Workers' rights vary from state to state. Here’s what you need to know about right-to-work and at-will employment in Massachusetts.

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Organizing in remote workplaces is based on the same principles of in-person organizing, but it can be daunting to reach out to people you’ve never met.

The post How Do You Organize in a Remote Workplace? appeared first on EWOC.

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Other Surveillance Technology Proposals Pass Council, Despite Community Opposition

By Siobhan M.

CAMBRIDGE — Community members flooded a meeting of the Cambridge City Council on Monday evening, successfully pushing the City Council to shunt back to committee a proposal for a surveillance drone for the Cambridge Police Department. The Council, over many residents’ strong objections, voted 6-3 to approve two other surveillance proposals: a device to unlock cell phones seized by police, and automated license plate recognition technology to allow police to track residents. The city’s unelected chief executive, City Manager Yi-An Huang, brought all three proposals on behalf of the Cambridge Police Department.

47 members of the public registered to speak at the meeting, the vast majority of whom spoke in opposition to the surveillance technology. “I’m terrified that the federal government has announced they’re going to go after my friends who have spoken truth to power about Palestine, and I do not want the Cambridge police to have more tools to do the same” said Dan T., a member of Boston Democratic Socialists of America, during the meeting’s public comment period. Dan stated this as part of a comment in which he also advocated for a municipal housing voucher program. Affordable housing was noted by many commenters as a better use of public funds than surveillance technology.

DSA was far from the only group standing up to this proposed expansion of the surveillance state. MIT’s Coalition Against Apartheid and Harvard’s Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee put out a joint statement urging community members to oppose the proposals, and many students and university workers answered the call. As “a union organizer and a community organizer,” Hanna M., a grad worker at MIT, said she has “had lots of firsthand experience with Cambridge PD, who shows up to even the smallest community actions with numbers, technology, and force that I would call comically unnecessary if it wasn’t also deeply chilling…a main use case of this technology is surveilling civilians who are exercising their right to protest.”

Some community members also highlighted the toll these proposals would take on surveilled communities. “Everyday surveillance puts significant wear and tear on the human body, elevating blood pressure and heart rate, ultimately resulting in chronic illness and staggering rates of poor mental health,” said Somaia S., a medical student. “Surveillance technology is not what Cambridge needs and is in direct opposition with the well being and good health of our community.”

While the Council’s majority seemed unconcerned by automated licence plate recognition technology, commenters noted it is a powerful tool to aid police misconduct and repression. Across “hundreds” of documented cases, police misused license plate readers “to get information on romantic partners, business associates, neighbors, journalists and others for reasons that have nothing to do with daily police work.” Virginia police were also caught using theirs to build databases of individuals attending political rallies.

While the community was able to fend off surveillance drones in Cambridge, they have been adopted by police departments across the country to monitor protests. An estimated 1,400 law enforcement agencies now use drones, with “event monitoring” seen among police as an increasingly necessary function. Yale PD, who arrested 48 pro-Palestine demonstrators at a sweep of a student encampment on April 22, 2024, were later revealed to have compiled a massive trove of information on the protestors, including drone images and social media profiles.

The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) was slated to help fund all three Cambridge PD proposals. UASI is a federal grant program of over $500 million a year to militarize and increase the surveillance capacity of state and local governments, as well as private nonprofits. Alongside other programs like the State Homeland Security Program (SHSP), this process of militarizing police departments functions as a giveaway of more than $1 billion per year to private weapons and surveillance contractors. UASI and SHSP were initiated in 2003, shortly after DHS’s founding, alongside other DHS elements like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). These DHS programs collectively serve to spy on and repress working class communities and political movements while lining the pockets of capitalist war and surveillance profiteers.

As part of his opposition to all three surveillance proposals, Boston DSA’s endorsed Cambridge City Councillor, Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, raised concerns about the surveillance technology also being used to enforce a future federal abortion ban.

Concerns about the Trump Administration’s potential misuse of surveillance data are entirely justified, but the surveillance and abuse of protestors has often been a bipartisan project. Democratic Party-led cities across the country used police to crack down on protests against American support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, including in Cambridge and Boston. Alejandro T., an MIT undergraduate student, recalled that “as students protested the complicity of the universities in the genocide of Palestinians, Cambridge PD aggressively arrested students as they peacefully protested. They had 5-6 cops pinning down individual students. They slammed students into the ground and caused multiple injuries in the process.” 

A militarized, capitalist-controlled police force, armed and outfitted by private arms and spyware dealers, will always be an opponent of the better world we strive to build. Socialists, and all those fighting America’s police state at home and imperialism abroad, must continue to stand against government surveillance no matter which capitalist party controls it.

Siobhan M. is a member of Boston DSA and UAW 2320. The views expressed herein are her own and do not represent her employer.

Photo by Pok Rie: https://www.pexels.com/photo/grey-quadcopter-drone-724921/

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Remembering the 8-week Strike on its 113th Anniversary

By Ben Cabral

LAWRENCE – On January 11, 1912, women textile workers walked off their jobs in protest of a cut to their pay. The industrial action would quickly grow to include more than 20,000 textile workers, and last for 8 weeks, becoming one of the most important labor struggles in Massachusetts and US labor history, and earning the name “The Bread and Roses Strike.” But what made this strike so important?  

In part, the importance of the strike was because it was waged by workers – ‘unskilled’ or semi-skilled, women, immigrants – who had largely been written off as ‘unorganizable’ by the conservative union establishment of the American Federation of Labor. But in spite of being written off by the establishment labor movement, primarily immigrant women from at least 51 different nations were able to band together, overcoming significant language and cultural barriers, to challenge the power of capital and win their primary demands addressing low wages, and unsafe working conditions. 

The Bread and Roses Strike also was marked for the role played by some of the titans of the labor movement in the early 20th century, including Industrial Workers of the World leaders Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurly Flynn.

The strike saw the implementation of many new tactics and substantial victories that created a blueprint for subsequent strikes which helped to expand the labor movement beyond the relatively privileged layers of native-born, high skilled workers organized by craft, and into the far larger layers of semi-skilled industrial workforce of the mass-production industries. Although it would not be for another two decades that the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) split from the AFL in order to fully embrace this industrial model of mass-organizing, this later split would not have been possible without the earlier efforts at industrial organizing which were, in part, kicked off by the Bread and Roses Strike. The historical impact of this strike means it is important for the modern labor movement to study its development and be able to implement the lessons of this strike, to win the rights that the working class deserves.

Slaves To The Loom

The city of Lawrence, Massachusetts was founded in the 1840s explicitly as a one-industry town to expand the textile industry out of Lowell, another nearby textile hub. By 1912, Lawrence was the textile capital of the United States, with a workforce made up primarily of Southern and Eastern Europeans, specifically Poles, Italians, and Lithuanians, as well as some Russians, Portuguese, and Armenians. There were also some smaller immigrant communities in Lawrence, most notably Syrians. The majority of the city’s black population also worked in the textile mills, although they made up a small percentage of the overall workforce. Many of these immigrant workers were women and children, who were intentionally hired after the mechanization and deskilling of textile mill labor, who could be paid significantly less. 

The working conditions in the mills were appalling. Poet William Blake summed it up perfectly as “these dark satanic mills.” Workers were regularly forced to work 6 days a week for 60 or more hours.1 Workers were frequently killed, maimed, or seriously disabled due to workplace accidents, while others died slowly from inhaling toxic fibers and dust. The life expectancy of a textile worker at this time was about 20 years lower than the rest of the population. In fact, over a third of workers in the Lawrence mills died before the age of 25, and 50% of children born to workers died before the age of 6.2

Early Organizing

Even before the strike broke out, and in response to the terrible conditions outlined above, there was a high degree of organization among the textile workers. There was an AFL union, the United Textile Worker, which claimed to represent several thousand of the more skilled textile worker, but in reality this union only counted a few hundred dues-paying members, evidence of its weakness even among the “organizable” minority of skilled worker, more likely to be native born men. Far more energetic was the organizing of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which had been active in Lawrence for 5 years prior to the strike. The IWW in Lawrence had 20 different foreign language chapters operating in the city to accommodate the various immigrant communities in Lawrence at the time. The Italian Socialist Federation (ISF), part of the Socialist Party of America, was also active in Lawrence at the time, and had some overlap with the IWW. In addition, many of the immigrant workers had experiences in cooperatives and unions in Europe and were able to use those experiences once they got to the United States. 

In fact, the workers had already been organizing, forming “shop committees” in the various textile mills to democratically relay their demands to the textile bosses, with organizing assistance from the IWW. In the fall of 1911, mill owners had refused to meet with the shop committees to discuss the upcoming cuts to working hours. The workers wanted assurances that their pay wouldn’t be reduced, since wages were already incredibly low. The mill owners’ refusal to meet with the shop committees agitated workers, who had also been struggling against long hours, horrible working and living conditions, and high infant mortality rates, along with the poor pay. 

Although the Bread and Roses Strike is often painted as a spontaneous action, it was actually these years of organizing, at least half a decade prior to the strike, which enabled workers to take the flashpoint of reduced wages and turn that into a massive 8 week strike.

The Strike Breaks Out

On January 11, 1912, a number of Polish women working at the Everett Mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts opened their checks and discovered that their pay had indeed been cut by 32 cents due to the slightly reduced work hours.

32 cents may not sound like a significant reduction in pay, however, wages had already been so low, about $8.76 a week, that this reduction was substantial. This group of Polish women proceeded to shut off their machines and started marching around Lawrence, taking to the other mills to notify the other workers of their strike over the cuts in pay, and later that night, word of what happened at Everett Mill spread around the workers’ tenements. The women of the Everett Mills’ brave actions clearly struck a nerve, as the next day, on January 12, some 10,000 workers shut off their machines and went on strike across the city. On the first day of the strike, workers slashed the belts on their machines and threw bricks through factory windows to protest their low pay and horrible working conditions and their bosses’ refusal to listen to them. And as news of the strike spread, farmers wanting to support the workers drove to Lawrence in order to donate whatever they could for food.3

Joseph Ettor of the IWW and Arturo Giovannitti of the ISF took the lead and formed a 56 person strike committee with 4 representatives from 14 different nationalities. This created a strong worker-led democratic leadership team with strong roots among the various sections of the workforce. This model was uncommon if not unique at the time, and stood in direct contrast to the typical AFL craft union model where the union bureaucracy had final say on everything. This robust democracy, which ensured representation for all the ethnic groups in the city, created a deep sense of belonging and unity for the workers which proved crucial when the United Textile Workers (UTW) tried to break the strike, claiming that they were the union that spoke for the workers. Because the workers felt such a strong sense of ownership in their movement, seeing the IWW as their vehicle for collective power, they stood behind the IWW leadership and ignored the UTW.

Another important aspect in building community among the workers was the effort made to cultivate deep connections between workers outside of working hours. The women in the city deliberately formed networks in the different ethnic neighborhoods of Lawrence. The language and cultural barriers were overcome through community spaces like soup kitchens, ethnic organizations, and community centers. These spaces brought the various immigrant communities in the city together, creating a sense of connection and commitment to each other. 

During the strike, the workers did more than hurting company profits by keeping factories closed and destroying mill property. In addition, they also actively worked to build mass support. They organized massive marches through the city with singing, chanting, and banners. The call for higher wages (Bread) and workplace dignity (Roses) was a consistent theme, and led to the chant from which this strike gets its name “We want bread and roses too.” Workers also entered stores in large numbers around the city to halt operations and create further disruptions. A key aspect to this strategy was to keep the pressure on the mill owners through these large public displays and keeping the mills closed, while also avoiding any unnecessary provocation or property destruction. The strike leaders were very aware of the need for public support and were deliberate in maintaining a positive image in the public as much as they reasonably could. 

These tactics would prove to be crucial in making sure material support was available to the strikers to help them maintain the strike and withstand the retaliation from the capitalist class.

Mill Owner Retaliation

The mill owners, the City of Lawrence, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts reacted to the strike with mass violence, revealing to the workers of Lawrence that the government was not a neutral party, but rather clearly in the pocket of the capitalist class. Police and state militiamen were called in to beat back the striking workers and protect the mills. Police used clubs to beat workers as they marched through the streets and picketed at their mills, while state militiamen stood around the mills with their bayonets pointed at the picketing workers. The police even killed two strikers, Anna LoPizzo and John Ramey, during a struggle between striking workers and scab workers that were being brought into the mills. The authorities later charged Ettor and Giovannitti as accomplices to the murder of Anna LoPizzo, even though they were nowhere near the scene when her murder actually took place. This was clearly an attempt by the state to disrupt the strike by targeting two of its leaders. 

Later when striking workers began to send their children to other cities, such as New York, Philadelphia, etc, police were present at the train stations and proceeded to beat and arrest the mothers there who were trying to send their kids to safety. Those same kids were forced to watch this ordeal, no doubt traumatizing them. 

But the mill owners did not stop with leaning on state repression, they also resorted to framing and discrediting the strikers. Mill owners hired a group of agitators to foment trouble among the strikers and even had a group plant dynamite near one of the mills in order to discredit the strikers. The man who was found to have planted the dynamite was not imprisoned, and was given a small $500 fine. It was later revealed that William M. Wood, president of the American Woolen Company which owned a number of the mills in Lawrence, had made a large payment to the man just before he had planted the dynamite.

The history of repression brought in by the state on behalf of the mill owners is a great reminder of who the state serves and the lengths they will go in order to protect capital. But the workers’ resistance, including their continuation of militant tactics paired with their savy appeals to public support, shows that even the unity of the capitalists and the state is no match for the unity of the militant working class.

The Strike Comes To An End

The stories of police brutally beating the mothers of Larence created outrage around the country. So much so that President Taft ordered the attorney general to investigate the strike and Congress began a hearing on March 2nd, 1912. Testimony from workers about the horrible working conditions and abject poverty dramatically shifted public opinion of the strike in favor of the workers. They highlighted diseases contracted by workers from inhaling dust and debris, deaths to workers due to workplace accidents, and others appalling stories. Specifically, a 14 year old girl named Carmela Toreli told the story of how her scalp was ripped off by one of the mill machines, which left her hospitalized for seven months. 

The massive shift in public support for the strikers, and the public pressure placed on the mill owners as a result, forced the mill owners to come to the table and discuss the demands of the workers. And by March 14th, workers and mill owners had reached an agreement that included a 15% wage increase for workers, an increase in overtime compensation, and a guarantee not to retaliate against the striking workers. This victory led to similar wage increases for 275,000 New England textile workers and workers in other industries as well. This result revealed the power of the industrial union model promoted by the IWW, and later by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), as opposed to the craft union model promoted by the AFL. Rather than trying to organize unions based on a specific job, the IWW focused on organizing unions based on industry as a means to unite all the workers in a given industry and allow them to have significantly more bargaining power and for the benefits of their wins to apply to more workers.

Meanwhile, Giovannitti and Ettor remained in jail for months after the end of the strike. Bill Haywood and the IWW threatened a general strike if they were not released. On March 10th, 1921, a 10,000 Lawrence workers protested for the release of Ettor and Giovannitti, and then later, on September 30th, 15,000 Lawrence workers went on strike to demand their release.4 There was even an international campaign for their release, with Swedish and French workers proposing a boycott of woolen goods from the US and protests in front of the US consulate in Rome. Fortunately, Ettor and Giovannitti, and a third defendant, who had never even heard of either of them and was at home eating dinner at the time of the killing, were all acquitted on November 26th 1912.

As many of the textile mills began to move south, efforts were made specifically by the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) to organize southern textile mills. CPUSA had begun organizing their own unions separate from the AFL, based foremost on their experience trying to bore within the AFL, but also in part being influenced by the Communist International’s (Comintern) position that world revolution was approaching due to the crisis of Capitalism and that communists should organize their own organizations, including unions. Southern mill towns were much more tightly monitored due to the mill owners’ tiger connections with local police, which made organizing much more difficult there. However, the CPUSA did have some early success organizing workers in the National Textile Workers Union (NTWU) which they organized through the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), including the famous strike at the Gastonia Mill in North Carolina. Ultimately, some of the high profile strikes by AFL unions and the rise of the CIO made many organizers within TUUL decide to rejoin the mainstream labor movement, which ultimately led to a dramatic reduction in the organizing efforts of these southern textile mills.5 

Lessons of the Strike

The Bread & Roses Strike is a reminder of the power of workers when they are organized and militant. Immigrant women are one of the most vulnerable groups in the United States, and yet this group of immigrant women were able to use their collective power as workers to deliver one of the most substantial wins in American labor history. One of the most important factors of the strike was the community built by the women in Lawrence through workplace organizing. This was crucial to overcoming the vast cultural differences among the workers and cultivating the sense of obligation to each other and the solidarity necessary to withstand the state repression, and build the networks of support for the strikers that allowed them to maintain the strike for 2 months. The strike committee was also crucial in maintaining unity among the workers, specifically the move to ensure representation for each of the ethnicities present among the workers was in place. This is similar to the practice of “mapping the workplace” in order to find natural leaders among the workers, which is so important in any successful unionization campaign. 

Many leaders of the IWW ended up leaving the IWW in favor of boring from within the reactionary AFL union. This came as a result of the failures of the IWW mentioned above in the previous section. This was more in line with the general marxist-leninist position of how to interact with trade unions, which Lenin had described in “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder”. The basis for this position is that communists need to be doing their work within the unions that the mass of workers most commonly reside in, even if those unions are led by more conciliatory labor partners of the capitalist class. 

Remembering our power as workers and making sure that we are talking with and making connections with our co-workers and with our communities will be crucial for the labor movement. Winning more substantial victories will require the courage of rank and file workers, and also the solidarity of other workers to build support systems for striking workers and isolate the employers by refusing to cross the picket line. And this can only be built through deliberate community building and organizing like what was done in the lead up to the Bread & Roses Strike.

Ben Cabral is a member of Boston DSA and contributor to Working Mass.

Photo Credits:

“Bread and Roses Strike of 1912: Two Months in Lawrence, Massachusetts, that Changed Labor History” Digital Public Library of America online exhibition
https://dp.la/item/3420c6a58eb17c992594e2e0f110980e

Remembering the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike – AFRICANIST PRESS ︎The Lawrence Textile Strike https://reuther.wayne.edu/node/8239 ︎The Strike That Shook America ︎Crossing Borders on the Picket Line: Italian-American Workers and the 1912 Strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts on JSTOR ︎Trust the Bridge That Carried Us Over: The Failure of Operation Dixie 1946-53 – Cosmonaut ︎“}]] 

Workers' rights vary from state to state. Here’s what you need to know about right-to-work and at-will employment in Virginia.

The post What are my rights as a worker in Virginia? appeared first on EWOC.

[[{“value”:”

This contribution was originally published by the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), and has been republished with permission. It does not represent the official position of Working Mass.

Statement of the UE General Executive Board

Since Donald Trump assumed the Presidency on January 20, he has issued a flurry of executive orders which will both directly cut living standards for working people and make it harder for us to organize and fight to improve our working and living conditions.

Trump was inaugurated surrounded by the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world. They had reason to celebrate — the world’s billionaires saw their wealth grow by $2 trillion last year, three times faster than in 2023. And with a cabinet full of billionaires, the new administration is poised to carry out a program of continuing to enrich themselves while dividing, repressing and bankrupting the working class. Our country is fast moving towards a more blatant and transparent form of oligarchy — rule by the super-rich.

On his first day in office, Trump appointed Republican Marvin Kaplan as chair of the National Labor Relations Board. The following week, he fired NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who had moved NLRB case law in a more pro-worker direction since she was confirmed in July 2021, and then, in a move of questionable constitutionality, fired Democratic NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox.

A Trump-appointed board and general counsel will continue the track record of the first Trump presidency, consistently supporting profits for bosses over rights for workers. We can also expect attacks on our union security clauses, whether through legislation or the courts — such as happened during Trump’s first term, when his first appointment to the Supreme Court proved the deciding vote in the Janus decision, stripping public-sector unions of their right to negotiate union security clauses.

Trump has given a prominent role in his administration to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, a multi-billionaire with a history of vicious anti-unionism and support for far-right and neo-Nazi parties. Musk has been given co-leadership of a new “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), which has tried to sell Congress on $2 trillion in spending cuts. Cuts of this depth are impossible without reductions to the spending required to maintain Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security at current benefit levels.

Regardless of whether Musk is successful in cutting a full $2 trillion, his new department will almost certainly pursue massive cuts to many social safety net programs, including health care, food security, housing, retirement, job-creating climate transition initiatives, and public education. President Trump has already begun ordering freezes on crucial federal aid to state and local governments, and funding for science research and nonprofit agencies that provide services to the American people, leaving thousands of UE members unsure if they will receive their next paycheck — or any paychecks — as of this week.

All of these steps will result in workers being laid off and cuts to the living standards of large numbers of working-class families in the U.S.

Trump’s imperialist foreign policy, with his threats of tariffs and annexations, are also making the world a more dangerous place for all working people, as he raises tensions with not only China but also the European Union, Great Britain, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, and many others.

Most threatening to the ability of workers to stand together and fight for what we need, though, are the efforts of Trump and his billionaire backers to divide the working class through attacks on immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, Black/African Americans, other people of color, and all who disagree with them.

Attacking immigrant workers hurts the entire working class, as employers take advantage of the fear caused by threats of deportation to undermine wages and working conditions, and weaken unions. And removing immigrants’ rights to due process — as the recently-passed “Laken Riley” bill does — threatens the very premise of “innocent until proven guilty.”

Despite the fact that Trump is entering his second term with an even smaller Congressional majority than he had in 2017, there are worrying signs that Democrats — nominally the “opposition party” in our two-party system — will not stand up to his corporate agenda. In January, 46 Democrats in the House joined the Republican majority in passing the Laken Riley bill, and 10 Democrats supported it in the Senate. Some Democrats also seem to be cozying up to the budget-slashing “DOGE” effort.

The fact is that the Republican agenda will not improve the economic situation for working people, and is, in fact, likely to make it worse. It is up to the labor movement, along with other working-class and popular organizations, and any elected political leaders that still stand with working people, to instead unite the working class to oppose the oligarchic agenda of the billionaires and corporations.

The labor movement will need to stick firmly to the basic labor movement principle that an injury to one is an injury to all. We will need to aggressively defend all of our members against attacks on their collective bargaining rights, their wages and working conditions, and their right to participate as full-fledged members of society regardless of their race, religion, immigration status, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity. We will need to clearly lay the blame for the ongoing cost-of-living crisis on corporations and the oligarchs, and both political parties which enable their greed. Labor needs to demand a positive economic program on behalf of the whole working class. And in addition to fighting for justice in our own country, we will need to continue to challenge our government when it pursues unjust foreign policies.

The actions of Trump and his billionaire supporters have already begun to generate popular resistance, and we can expect to see more. The labor movement needs to play a key role in channeling that anger into an effective fightback. And in order to best fight for a better future for working people, we will need to develop a political organization, such as a labor party, that is independent of the Democratic Party.

“UE” is the abbreviation for United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, a democratic national union representing tens of thousands of workers in a wide variety of manufacturing, public sector and private service-sector jobs. UE is an independent union (not affiliated with the AFL-CIO) proud of its democratic structure and progressive policies.

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By Aaron Hall

BOSTON—On Saturday afternoon, members of the Blue Bottle Independent Union (BBIU) performed a walkout at three of their locations. The walkouts took place at exactly 12:30 pm at Kendall and Newbury, and 2:30pm at Chestnut Hill, meant to coincide with peak hours for each location. The walkouts came in response to the company’s decision to close their Prudential Center location. The walkouts lasted exactly 7 minutes and 59 seconds in reference to their demand for a $7.59 tip differential. 

Some of the main issues the BBIU raised were guaranteed hours, a commuter benefit for transferred workers, and the $7.59 tip differential for Prudential workers – a value based on the average amount of tips made by workers in 2024. 

A tip differential is the wage the employer must pay the worker in addition to the minimum wage for service workers, which stands at $6.75 per hour in Massachusetts, if the total valuation of tips doesn’t meet the minimum required by the state or contract. This fight comes as displaced workers will have a lower share of the tip pool as they are moved and added to different locations.

Alex Pyne, Vice President of the BBIU stated that they are “taking action today because baristas should be able to live off their wages and not rely on the generosity of customers to make ends meet. Blue Bottle could have guaranteed a tip differential for Prudential workers but instead they told us that they didn’t want to pay any ‘additional costs.’”

Alex went on to say “Blue Bottle’s continuous retaliation against us has shown that the only way we are going to win a living wage, consistent schedules, protection from harassment, or workplace democracy is through solidarity and collective action.”

Blue Bottle Coffee, Inc., is a coffee roaster and retailer whose majority stake was acquired by Nestle in 2017. Nestle is the world’s largest food company and notorious for alleged use of union-busting activity, slavery, and child labor. However, 52.7% of Nestle’s employees are covered by collective bargaining agreements as of 2023.

According to Kendall Square worker Louis Soults, negotiations began in November with the company “refusing to negotiate in good faith.” Louis went on to say that “transportation costs for [displaced] workers for 2 months would be [approximately] $8,000, which is about the amount the Prudential location makes in a day.”

The BBIU represents around 67 workers at 6 locations around Boston, including baristas, shift managers, and assistant café leaders. The union is young, forming with a vote of 38-4 on May 3, 2024. The union was formed through an NLRB election after management refused to voluntarily recognize their union, launching their effort publicly in April of 2024. The independent union faces an uphill battle against Blue Bottle Coffee and their major stakeholder, Nestle. Negotiations and bargaining sessions for a new contract remain ongoing.

Aaron Hall is a Biotech worker and a writer for Working Mass.

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[[{“value”:”Tufts’ full-time faculty union held a rally Monday morning to mark the beginning of the two day strike.

Maxine Bouvier & Vanessa Bartlett

MEDFORD– Full-time lecturers at Tufts University started their two-day strike Monday morning following a strike authorization vote of 94%. Lecturers, members of SEIU-509, have been bargaining for 10 months with the university for liveable wages and fair workloads. 

Faculty’s current demands are a 3.5% annual increase after an initial adjustment for cost of living, along with a reduction in unmanageable workloads. As it stands, Tufts offers a 2.5% merit raise that has remained stagnant. The average full-time lecturer salary is at or below 80% of the area median income (depending on household size). 

According to biology lecturer Helen McCreary, Tufts salaries are also not on par with those of peer institutions. 

“If you adjust for cost of living, we’re the second lowest. And even if you look, rather than looking at peer institutions, adjusting for cost of living, if you look at other universities in this area that are research heavy institutions, we’re also the second lowest.” 

Picketers marched to the Medford/Tufts green line stop, where they picketed for an hour.

Low salaries have meant that many full time lecturers are unable to afford to live nearby the university. As housing costs in the Greater Boston area have continued to skyrocket, these faculty members typically commute an hour plus to teach at Tufts. This affords lecturers less time to spend with their families, and with their students. 

On top of financial struggles, lecturers say they are overburdened with large class sizes as Tufts continues to up enrollment targets. McCreary’s intro biology classes have ballooned to 480-550 students, class sizes she says Tufts simply does not have the space to accommodate.

“I’m excited about Tufts having more students, the students are phenomenal, but that increased enrollment needs to come with more support for teaching,” says McCreary. 

Lecturers, whose job duties include teaching, mentoring students, and carrying out other service work feel that they are not able to deliver on the high quality of education that Tufts promises to its students under these conditions. 

“Students pay tuition, some of the highest in the country, but we don’t see that tuition being reinvested back into providing a quality education. Because, you know, we certainly are not having more faculty to teach more students. They’re saying ‘do more with less,’ says striking lecturer Penn Loh. 

Somerville City Councilor Willie Burnley Jr. on the picket line.

Faculty on strike say the Tufts community has been deeply supportive of their efforts. Students see that they are overworked, and families are frustrated to see the high tuition costs they pay are not put into their students’ education.

A Tufts sophomore, Ben, who came out to support the full time lecturers union on the picket line, shared his reasoning: 

“I want my faculty members to be able to support themselves easily, to not have to make long commutes, so that they can be, like, good teachers.” 

Lecturers have also received support from local elected officials, including Somerville City Councillor Willie Burnley Jr., state representative Erika Uyterhoven, and Zach Bears of the Medford City Council, all of whom were present at the picket on Monday. 

“It is incredibly frustrating to see that there are multiple unions currently rallying, fighting for their rights at Tufts when we know that they have a surplus of 34 million this past year. They have the money to support their workers and are making the choice to not,” said Burnley.

As McCreary puts it, “Our working conditions are students learning conditions.” 

Regarding the decision to strike, Loh said it was a tough choice. “I really didn’t want to have to take an action like this,  but in a lot of ways we felt like this was the only way for us to send a clear message that we are not going to do an either or, either you get a better workload or better pay. We actually need both.”

“Our learning conditions = profs’ teaching conditions!” one sign reads.

Maxine Bouvier is a member of Boston DSA.

Vanessa Bartlett is the vice-chair of the Working Mass editorial board and a member of Boston DSA.

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