February 12, 2021
Every week, we bring you a roundup of the top news and commentary about issues and events important to working families. Here’s the latest edition of the Working People Weekly List.
The Amazon Warehouse Union Vote in Alabama Is a Big Deal: Amazon responded quickly to the pandemic spike in online shopping. It added 400,000 employees in the first nine months of last year. It added new facilities and new airplanes to deliver goods. And across the company’s fulfillment centers, the pressure on Amazon workers to get orders out fast, to make rate, became more intense than ever. That dogged pursuit of efficiency has pushed some workers to a breaking point. This week, employees at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, are voting on whether to unionize. On Thursday’s episode of What Next, I talked to Washington Post reporter Jay Greene about what the workers want, how management is fighting back, and what this action the first of its kind at Amazon in seven y
Juneau, Alaska (KINY) - An Anchorage Superior Court judge has ruled that the State of Alaska breached its collective bargaining with the Alaska State Employees Association, violated the separation of powers provision in the constitution, and the Public Employee Relations and Administrative Procedures Acts.
Judge Gregory Miller ordered a permanent injunction for the state s attempted interference with ASEA membership and union administration. The dispute centered over the collection of dues by the union and those employees who chose to opt-out of paying dues.
The judge also ordered to the state to pay the union more than $186,000 in damages.
Union Executive Director Jake Metcalfe said in a release issued by his office that he is pleased with the court ruling. He said the Governor took a radical and unsupported legal action that hurt all state employees and wasted state resources, time, and attention from other more important issues.
For Alaska state employees, temporary pandemic telework may become permanent Published December 17, 2020
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Print article More than 6,000 of Alaska’s 14,000 state employees are working from home in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus. For some, the alternate working conditions will soon become permanent. For many more, a long-term change is in the works. According to public records, the state of Alaska is spending at least $58.2 million in federal COVID-19 aid on a permanent telework program for state employees. The effort, called the Pandemic Preparedness Program, will not be fully implemented until 2022, but the state has already bought thousands of laptops and other equipment to support telework, and the budget proposed by Gov. Mike Dunleavy last week indicates that some state agencies are switching to permanent telework or a hybrid system that limits office time.