NEARLY 14,000 Uber and Lyft drivers in New York have signed up to join the local branch of the Amalgamated Transit Union, according to a union spokesperson.
The group plans to rally at the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) headquarters next week to demand a formal vote on unionising. The 14,000 sign-ups exceed the 30 per cent threshold that federal regulators say must trigger an official vote, the union says. The cards signed by drivers indicate that they seek ATU membership and authorise the union to act as their collective bargaining agent.
In May, Uber struck a deal with the International Association of Machinists and the independent Freelancers Union to form a new Independent Drivers Guild that would represent their workers. While not an official union, the Guild is open to the 35,000 drivers Uber says it employs in New York.
As a condition of the agreement to form the Guild, the Machinists union promised not to try to formally unionise Uber drivers for five years; both the ATU and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers have been actively trying to unionise Uber drivers since last winter.
Uber maintains its drivers are independent contractors, not employees, and therefore do not have the right to unionise, although recent legislation in Seattle affirmed their right to do so.
The ATU’s Local 1181-1061 branch is the largest chapter of the ATU, representing more than 14,000 transit workers including drivers and mechanics throughout New York City, Westchester, and Long Island.
The 190,000-member Amalgamated Transit Union represents city and school bus drivers, subway and ferry operators, mechanics and maintenance workers, among others in the US and Canada. Drivers will rally at the TLC headquarters in Long Island City on Tuesday, September 27, at 11am.
• Writers Guild of America, East announced September 22 that nonfiction writer-producers at Peacock Productions have finally won the right to join the union. The announcement followed an August 26 decision by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that the employees are union eligible.
Writers-producers at Peacock Productions, the ‘reality’ and nonfiction television production subsidiary of Comcast/NBCUniversal, filed for a union election with the NLRB in October 2012. But Peacock Productions and NBCUniversal fought the election claiming that the freelance writers-producers on their nonfiction programmes were supervisors who didn’t have the right to form a union.
Under the WGAE, members are entitled to bargain and negotiate over compensation and working conditions with employers. Unionised workers also have access to affordable health insurance. The NLRB Region 2 in New York ruled against Peacock and ordered the election to go forward, which it did on June 14, 2013. NBCU filed an appeal, and after the election, the NLRB impounded the ballots until a decision was made by the national board in Washington, DC.
The ballots were counted shortly after the NLRB ruled on August 26 that these employees did, in fact, have the right to unionise under federal labour law. ‘While NBC has been dragging its feet the past three years, nonfiction workers have won union elections at New York’s biggest production companies,’ said David Van Taylor, a producer at Peacock Productions, in a statement. ‘Peacock workers now expect to negotiate a contract that protects their rights, just as Writers Guild contracts have protected the rights of NBC’s fiction writers for years.’
Among the shows that Peacock Production writers-producers help create are Investigation Discovery’s Dead of Night and The Weather Channel’s Twist of Fate. ‘It is past time for NBCU to stop playing lawyerly games, to honour the decision of Peacock’s employees to engage in collective bargaining and to sit down at the table with us to hammer out an agreement,’ Lowell Peterson, executive director of the Writers Guild of America, East, said in a statement.
• Corning Community College Faculty and its union members, along with students, residents and officials from out of the area rallied in front of the CCC Commons Building in support of the faculty during its labour dispute with the school.
The Professional Educators of Corning Community College (PECCC) and CCC are presently involved in a labour dispute with disagreements regarding salary, understaffing and student services. The union has since formed a crisis committee, and a state mediator has been assigned to facilitate negotiations. ”We want a fair contract,’ Crisis Committee Chairman Tim Bonomo said. ‘We want people to be treated with respect.’
At Thursday evening’s rally, union officials spoke to residents and peers in an attempt to invigorate them and draw support. ‘Who’s college?’ PECCC president Ryan Hersha chanted enthusiastically, to which the crowd would interchangeably shout back in unison, ‘Our college!’ ‘The community’s college!’
‘Having you here is a big piece of the puzzle,’ Bonomo said to the crowd. ‘It allows the people who are sitting in the other room… to recognise that they represent you, and our college. This college does not belong to the administration. The college belongs to the students and the faculty,’ he added.
Hersha called on CCC to amend negotiations between the two parties, which the union has said have deteriorated in recent weeks. ‘We are at impasse with the administration,’ Hersha said. ‘This administration needs to start negotiating in good faith with all bargaining units.’
Faculty and union members weren’t the only ones that addressed the crowd. One CCC student addressed the rally to describe her perspective and the possible consequences the dispute could have on her and the student body. It’s incredibly important for students because as investors in this college, there’s nothing more important than our professors,’ first-year nursing student Polly LeFevre said. ‘They directly influence our education.’
Several officials from other institutions throughout the state made the trip to CCC too. Faculty association president Dave Michalak of SUNY Broome Community College in Binghamton was among them. We obviously are concerned about all of our colleagues that are basically fighting the same fight that we recently concluded this past June,’ he said.
‘To see them at a juncture now where they have no movement, we want to make sure that they know that we do support their effort. Anything we can do we’ll certainly try to help.’
Officials expressed gratitude for the support of those who came to the rally and those involved with the issue on behalf of the faculty. ‘I believe in this college,’ Hersha said. ‘And the reason I believe in this college is I believe in this community. I see the community out here.’
‘Thank you for being here, we really, really appreciate it,’ Bonomo said. ‘There is nothing we can do that matches having you here with us.’ The union and its supporters addressed its concerns to CCC’s Board of Trustees at the board’s regional meeting directly after the rally’s conclusion.
In a statement following the board meeting’s conclusion, board chair Carl Blowers said, ‘the Trustees have confidence that our College team is bargaining in good faith at the negotiating table with the purpose of reaching an agreement that will help ensure the present and the future for CCC, our students, and our community.’
