Now for the good news
Employees at Ultium Cells, a joint venture of GM and LG Energy Solution in Warren, Ohio, voted 710 to 16 to join the UAW, according to the National Labor Relations Board. The plant has roughly 900 workers.
This gives the powerful union a foothold in the new wave of EV component and assembly plants unleashed by historic clean-energy investments pushed by the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress.
Note the vote: 710 votes for the union, only 16 opposed!!! And the union: United Auto Workers!!!
The UAW is also the union of the 48,000 striking University of California academic workers.
And more good news, from North Carolina
With their 2020 win, nurses at Mission Hospital in Asheville, NC are on the leading edge of organizing in the South and are already scoring big victories. Through their Professional Practice Committee, they’ve pushed management to make major investments in staffing, both for nurse retention and for support staff like phlebotomists. They’ve seen staffing levels improve in response to Assignment Despite Objection forms that nurses file. And this fall, the hospital, which is owned by HCA, the largest for-profit hospital chain in the United States, announced it was investing $22 million in pay raises for its health care workers who provide or directly support patient care — undoubtedly a result of pressure from its union nurses.
Will nurses take the lead in bringing unions to the South? Let’s hope so.
From Southern Revival, National Nurses Magazine, July | August | September 2022
And now the not so good news, for folks in New Hanover County, NC, USA
Just under 2 years ago, the Board of Commissioners for the county “sold” our hospital to a large, and growing, hospital conglomerate, Novant. This despite the fact that our hospital had an excellent record in terms of serving the community and Novant had a terrible history in its hospital acquisitions in other parts of the state. The “sale” had many questionable aspects (see my Aug. 28th post, A Cautionary Tale: Privatization and Its Toll, posted I might add, just before my 6-day emergency visit to said hospital, which confirmed all the worst reports), but one of the most egregious was that almost all of the cash for the sale, $1.25 billion, was put into an endowment under the control of Novant!
Up until this week, not one penny of the Endowment had been disbursed to the community. Now the local media is reporting that decisions have been made to disburse the first $9 million. Looks like "our" money is being well spent. The awards of approximately $9 million to community organizations (a number of which are, at least in my mind, suspect) was reported along with the apparent loss of $150 million in the assets of the endowment. Where did all that money go? To the salaries of the endowment’s managers? To the banks that are holding the endowment’s money? To the hiring of what can only be described as a criminal organization, Black Rock, Inc, the world's largest asset manager, to manage the rest of the funds ($1.1 billion)?
What will happen to the remaining $1.1 billion? How much of it will end up in the hands of Black Rock’s CEO and stockholders, the big banks and Novant’s management?
It just gets worse and worse, doesn't it?
And more bad news for consumers and workers everywhere
Thousands of workers at two of America’s biggest supermarkets are warning of potential mass layoffs as the giant firms push for a merger. Kroger, the second largest grocery chair in the US, and Albertsons, the fourth largest, are pushing for a merger through the Federal Trade Commission.
Kroger’s chief executive, Rodney McMullen, claimed no employees would be laid off, but said the company planned to place 100 to 350 stores into a spin-off company. In past mergers, spin-off companies, saddled with the least profitable stores, often ended up going out of business, and thus laying off thousands of workers.
In other news, Albertsons announced that it would pay shareholders about $4 billion in special dividends as part of the merger agreement.
From an article in The Guardian
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