800 Steelworkers at Kaiser Win Wage Increases—and More Bargaining News
Some 800 United Steelworkers members at Kaiser Aluminum negotiate a wage increase and signing bonus in their new five-year pact, and more news from the “Bargaining Digest Weekly.” The AFL-CIO Collective Bargaining Department delivers daily, bargaining-related news and research resources to more than 1,200 subscribers. Union leaders can register for this service through our website, Bargaining@Work.
SETTLEMENTS
USW, Kaiser Aluminum: 800 Kaiser Aluminum workers in Heath, Ohio, and Spokane, Wash., ratified a new five-year contract effective Oct. 1. The contract provides the United Steelworkers (USW) members a signing bonus and wage increases.
Teens Get LifeSmart
The Final Four are New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Oklahoma and Washington State. It’s not the NCAA final hoops quartet, but the National Consumers League’s (NCL‘s) LifeSmarts national championship competition has the same tension and passion.
Teams of four to five teens, coached by an adult participant, compete in district and state matches with the state winners going to the national competition to vie for the national LifeSmarts title. More than 22,000 consumer savvy teens representing 30 states competed at the national competition, which ends today in St. Louis, held to teach the next generation of consumers how to succeed in the marketplace.
Spokane Leader: Don’t Believe Anti-Union Smear Campaign
As the grassroots effort to pass the Employee Free Choice Act unfolds across the country, the corporate campaign of disinformation and distraction against workers also is under way. Advocates for the freedom to form unions and bargain need to work hard to fight the smears and promote the truth about employee free choice.
In an op-ed this week, Beth Thew, secretary-treasurer of the Spokane Regional Labor Council, cuts through the spin and notes who’s behind the big-dollar corporate campaign against the freedom to form unions and bargain—and what they’re really fighting for.
In the article published in the Spokane Spokesman-Review, Thew writes:
The provision that strikes fear in the heart of Corporate America is allowing the workers to decide for themselves whether they want to form a union through the traditional government-supervised ballot election or by signing authorization cards.
