When we stand up and fight for our rights, when we build solidarity and resolve and take it to sympathetic, alternative media (corporate media is a lost cause, being owned by the same companies who are firing workers for "disrupting commerce"), the capitalist, bizarro-world economic model can be righted to better reflect the true balance of power in the workplace. Still a long way to go to even catch up with 30's-era unionization, though. Don't mourn, organize! --Pete
Under pressure, Raleigh City Council members voted six to two on Dec. 5 to authorize payroll deduction for the Raleigh City Workers Union-UE Local 150. This vote reflects the power being gained by city workers, first exercised in their mid-September strike.
 City workers’ summit, Raleigh, N.C. Photo: Andrew Dinkelaker |
Pushed even further by the workers’ power, the council also voted five to three to waive the $1,000 administrative fee to process the union membership forms.
The Raleigh City Workers Union now has both payroll deduction and meet-and-confer status. It has also won a number of other significant gains through unity and struggle. These include all overtime being paid at time and a half—previously workers were only getting compensatory time and often getting nothing; 15 percent to 20 percent pay increases for entry-level positions citywide; reduced forced overtime; temporary workers made permanent citywide; sick leave policy improvements; some of the worst management forced out and unfair suspensions reversed.
In addition to sanitation department workers, other city workers in Raleigh—from the parks and recreation department, public works and public utilities—are beginning to join the union and attend Raleigh City Workers Union meetings.
Beyond Raleigh, the momentum from these tremendous gains is being felt across the entire state of North Carolina.
More than 60 workers from nine cities across North Carolina attended the Dec. 9 Statewide City Workers Summit. UE Local 150 has established City Worker chapters in Durham, Charlotte, Chapel Hill and Rocky Mount. Recently UE began reaching out to city workers in Wilson, Greenville, Goldsboro and Greensboro, whose leadership attended the summit. At the summit workers spoke out and received important training to build the union.
Durham city workers also staged a several hour work stoppage the morning of Nov. 27 to bring attention to their issues.
The struggle in the South—and North Carolina in particular—is intensifying as workers across the state continue to walk out of their jobs in organized resistance.
From the Fayetteville Goodyear workers striking with the Steel Workers union, from the Smithfield Hog Plant with mostly immigrant workers striking, to all job actions carried out by city workers, the atmosphere is changing.
As Saladin Muhammad, organizer with UE Local 150 and chair of Black Workers for Justice, explains in “Raleigh City Workers Exercise Power and Build Their Union,” his recently released pamphlet: “The anti-union Taft Hartley Act enacted in 1947 during the period of legal segregation established a section (14 b.), allowing states to establish additional laws to complement their racist state laws. The racist oppression of African Americans in the South and the division of Black and white workers was and continues to be the basis for dividing the Southern and larger U.S. working class and maintaining the South as a region of cheap labor.”
Workers are organizing against the brutal anti-worker, anti-woman, racist laws, and a movement has been developing to repeal N.C. General Statute 95-98, which prohibits public-sector collective bargaining.
It is a challenge to the left as a whole to support the demands of Raleigh and other city workers as they struggle for justice.
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