HANOVER, N.H. (AP), 3/5/2024 — The Dartmouth men’s basketball team voted to unionize Tuesday in an unprecedented step toward forming the first labor union for college athletes and another blow to the NCAA’s deteriorating amateur business model.
In an election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board in the school’s human resources offices, the players voted 13-2 to join Service Employees International Union Local 560, which already represents some Dartmouth workers. Every player on the roster voted.
“Today is a big day for our team,” said Dartmouth juniors Cade Haskins and Romeo Myrthil, who have led the effort. “We stuck together all season and won this election. It is self-evident that we, as students, can also be both campus workers and union members. Dartmouth seems to be stuck in the past. It’s time for the age of amateurism to end.”
A coalition of labor unions said Tuesday that it had ended its boardroom fight with Starbucks after the coffeehouse chain agreed to negotiate labor agreements, a sign of progress after years of tumultuous relations between the company and its organized workers.
The Strategic Organizing Center union alliance pulled its slate of three board candidates about a week before a March 11 shareholder vote on the 11-member board. The announcement comes more than two years into a campaign that has unionized nearly 400 Starbucks stores.
On Tuesday, the alliance said it was “time to acknowledge the progress that has been made and to allow the company and its workers to focus on moving forward.”
“We think it’s imperative that shareholders continue to monitor the board’s performance and Starbucks’ approach to labor relations issues in the coming months — and we plan to continue to hold the company accountable going forward,” the alliance said.
For more than two years Starbucks has fought fiercely against unionization. Now the company appears willing to come to the bargaining table.
Starbucks and its union made a surprise joint announcement in late February: they had agreed to seek “a constructive path forward” on “the future of organizing and collective bargaining”.
On Tuesday, the Starbucks union said it would resume in-person bargaining with the company in late April, with the aim of achieving a “foundational framework agreement”. It said there would be “bargaining delegates representing more than 400” unionized Starbucks stores.
The news – while cautiously received – is not just much-needed cheer for workers at the coffee chain, but for others at Amazon, Trader Joe’s and the outdoor sports retailer REI, whose own efforts to reach a first contract have barely inched forward in the last 18 months.
Google’s refusal to bargain with unionized YouTube Music workers is illegal, a Wednesday ruling from the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) found.
After a group of Texas-based contract workers for YouTube Music unanimously voted last April to join the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU), Google refused to bargain over return to office complaints, a move the NLRB deemed illegal.
At the center of the issue is a fight over who’s the boss. Google, which owns YouTube, claims it is not legally the employer of contract workers, but the NLRB says otherwise. It ordered Google to both “cease and desist” refusal to engage with the union and said Google must “bargain on request.”
The Alphabet Workers Union, which represents workers at Google's parent company, Alphabet, said Google laid off the YouTube Music team on Friday.
Some of the Alphabet workers found out about the layoff while they were speaking at an Austin City Council meeting in Texas, where the city council was set to vote on a resolution asking the company to negotiate with the union.
"We just got laid off, our jobs are ending today, effective immediately," one worker tells the city council in video of the meeting.
Google has publicly refused to negotiate with the Alphabet union since workers voted to unionize in April 2023, the union says.
WASHINGTON—Yesterday, the American Federation of Teachers executive council, the body representing the union’s 1.72 million educators, higher education professionals, healthcare workers and public employees, unanimously adopted an omnibus statement addressing the war in the Middle East and its impact on the United States.
The path to this resolution reflects significant input from and discussion with AFT affiliate leaders and rank-and-file members from around the country, including listening and learning sessions starting right after Oct. 7, the day of the Hamas attack on Israel. It is a comprehensive statement that includes specific steps toward long-term peace in the region, and it addresses the effects of the conflict at home. The resolution calls for:
The resolution also condemns the obstacles the AFT sees toward peace, including Hamas, and the Netanyahu government’s policies.
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