Socialist District 3 representative Kshama Sawant’s relationship with the region’s organized labor has become an issue in a now four day-long carpenters strike.
“Outside interference in the fight for fair wages for 12,000 hard working carpenters plays right into the hands of anti-union forces,” Evelyn Shapiro, head of the Northwest Carpenters Union said in a statement earlier this week: Continue reading
(Image: @SEIU1199NW)
A Wednesday afternoon march will mark the midway of a planned three-day strike as nearly 8,000 Swedish Medical Center nurses and caregivers are fighting for a new, better contract with the nonprofit Seattle-area health provider.
The strike is hitting Seattle campuses including First Hill, Cherry Hill, Ballard, Edmonds and Issaquah where Swedish says it planned to use thousands of temporary workers to continue its services.
Emergency rooms in Ballard and Redmond have been closed during the strike which is slated to end Friday morning. Organizers claim Swedish management has threatened to lock striking workers out through the weekend.
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It was a quiet Monday night at QFC after union reps announced a tentative agreement in labor talks.
UPDATE 9:39 PM: Word of a contract agreement came to employees at one of the two Broadway QFCs on Capitol Hill by way of text message:
“UFCW 21: Fnly rec. tentative agreement reached. Continue vote, meetings will be announced”
“This is huge for us,” one employee told CHS. “It came to the point that at seven o’clock, if no union representative came in to talk to us, we would have walked.”
UPDATE 5:58 PM: Union representatives say they have a tentative agreement in hand and that there will not be a strike. Details will be made public following membership votes.
Original report: Big chain grocery stores in Seattle and throughout the Salish Sea region are braced for the first worker strike since 1989.
Unions for around 21,000 grocery workers at QFC, Fred Meyer, Safeway, and Albertsons chain stores have set a Monday, 7 PM deadline for negotiations to settle on a new contract. In 2010, the groups pounded out a deal without a strike.
A few collaborators from Capitol Hill coworking space Office Nomads helped create a live Twitter screen to accompany a strike countdown clock in Westlake Park
The 2013 dispute has been brewing since this summer when CHS covered a series of pickets at area stores to bring attention to the growing labor unrest. In the meantime, signs have been posted at the Hill’s markets advertising part-time jobs in recent weeks as management prepares to try to find workers to cross picket lines in the event the unions walk out.
Union representatives have said battles over lack of wage growth, holiday pay and requirements for part-time workers to transition to the new federal health care programs are at the center of the contract standoff. Continue reading
