Ep 132 - Looks Like a Rail Strike’s Back on the Menu

To start this week's episode of Work Stoppage, we check in on the fight for a better contract for school staff in Ontario as CUPE appears to have been backed into a corner following the decision not to launch a province wide general strike. Posties in the UK have voted to extend their strike to multiple dates in December, including Christmas Eve. Our huge news follow up this week is that workers in the two biggest rail unions finally have the results of their vote on the TA, and SMART-TD workers have voted it down, bringing us very close to a nationwide rail strike. While most of the news about Elon Musk lately has been his mismanagement of Twitter, news has come about about rampant wage theft and unsafe conditions at the construction of Tesla's latest "gigafactory" in Austin. Another group of educators has joined the academic strikewave, as adjunct faculty at The New School in NYC hit the picket lines to fight for a wage they can actually afford to live on. A report from The Intercept this week revealed shady management of UAW assets by the incumbent administration, including lowballing estimates of size of the strike fund by tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. This past week also saw the formation of a new union in the South, the Union of Southern Service Workers, to fight for workers rights in one of the most exploited parts of the country. Finally, lots of Starbucks news this week as workers launched the "Red Cup Rebellion", the first nationwide coordinated strike since the union launched a year ago.

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