Listen: UAW Strike Update - Plus More Worker Uprisings!

UAW rank and file members who work for the Volvo-owned Mack Trucks company overwhelmingly rejected a tentative contract.

By Bob Hennelly

On this week’s episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour — the UAW strike continues. Some 4,000 UAW rank and file members who work for the Volvo-owned Mack Trucks company overwhelmingly rejected a tentative contract. The proposed agreement included a 20 percent wage increase over five years with a ten percent increase in the first year and a guarantee of no increases in workers’ health care insurance premiums for the term of the contract.

In a major breakthrough, UAW President Shawn Fain announced that General Motors will include electric vehicle battery production in the UAW's national master agreement. In that same Facebook Live appearance last week, Fain said UAW negotiators had made significant progress in negotiations with the Big Three automakers, and as a result would not be opting to expand the UAW’s Stand-Up Strike which has just strategically idled a small fraction of the industry’s manufacturing.

Last week SAG-AFTRA and management held talks — the first since the 160,000-member union went out in mid-July. The talks were described as productive.

Close to 80,000 healthcare workers affiliated with SEIU and other unions in several states and Washington, D.C. wrapped up their three-day strike against the massive Kaiser Permanente non-profit hospital conglomerate that paid its CEO $16 million dollars last year. Key issues include staffing.

Reuters reported that Acting U.S. Labor Secretary Julie Su, who was a mediator during an all-night negotiating session last week, will return to California to "assist the parties in advancing talks" when they return to the bargaining table next week, the Labor Department announced.

And here in our region, the United Steelworker Nurses Local 4-200, who have been on strike for safer staffing at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, NJ since Aug.4, have returned to the bargaining table.

Later this week, there will be a national dedication of the permanent monument at the site of the 1911 Triangle Fire in Greenwich Village that killed 146 mostly young immigrant female garment workers and launched the worker safety and labor movements. Mary Ann Trasciatti, president of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition and director of Hofstra University’s Labor Studies Program discusses the significance of the memorial and how the tragedy is relevant over 100 years later in the midst of organized labor second wind in the 21st century.

Nancy Danella, president of the United Steelworkers Local 4-200, also updates us on her union’s strike for safer staffing against Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital that’s entering its third month. She’s joined by Kevin Brown, NJ VP for SEIU 32 BJ, America’s largest building service union representing more than 175,000 workers in 11 states and Washington, DC.

NYC Association of Legislative Employees (NYC City Council staff) President Dan Kroop and VP Vinari Ranaweera also join this week’s show to discuss their independent union’s ongoing effort to get their first contract.

Listen to the entire program below: