labor

Nearly a quarter of a million American workers went on strike in 2022, and baristas and fast-food workers were leading the charge, according to a report released Tuesday by Cornell University’s Worker Institute. It found that Starbucks employees and fast-food workers are fueling a sharp uptick in work stoppages across the country, which have increased by more than 50 percent in the past year. No paywall

In 2012, a group of 200 fast-food workers walked off the job in New York City and demanded a $15 hourly wage and a union. In the decade since, the “Fight for $15,” as the movement came to be called, has secured higher wages for more than 26 million workers, lowered the racial wealth gap in many states and pumped more than $87 billion into local economies, according to a report released Tuesday by the National Employment Law Project (NELP).

After months of delay, the Biden administration on Thursday released a rule dictating how employers in the healthcare sector should protect workers from the spread of Covid-19. The exclusion of meatpacking, food processing, farm, and grocery retail workers from the new workplace standards sparked an outcry from worker advocacy groups and unions.(No paywall)

Restaurant owners have reported difficulty finding workers as many states and cities lift the pandemic restrictions that led to mass layoffs in the sector last year. But the vast majority of restaurant workers say they would stay in the industry if provided with a stable, livable wage, according to a new report from One Fair Wage and the U.C. Berkeley Food Labor Research Center.

The thousands of workers who pick, pack, and process our food have become eligible to receive the Covid-19 vaccine in many states. But they still face obstacles to actually getting the vaccine, as companies sort out their vaccination policies and advocates struggle to secure enough doses for a workforce that ranks among the most vulnerable to the coronavirus. (No paywall)

As Covid-19 spreads in meatpacking plants across the country, a number of groups representing ranchers and farmers have joined with a key labor union to call for stronger protections for meatpacking workers. The alliance comes as the tally of meat industry workers who have contracted the disease approaches 25,000, even as companies restrict information about outbreaks at their facilities. (No paywall)

Environmentalists, labor groups, and animal rights advocates on Tuesday condemned President Trump's planned executive order to keep meatpacking plants open, despite reported outbreaks of Covid-19 at more than 60 of these plants across the country.

In Jennifer E. Gaddis’s new book, The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools, school lunch is the framework for serious thinking about politics and people power. Gaddis makes the case that to reform school food, we need better working conditions and pay for cafeteria workers in addition to more nutritious ingredients. I asked Gaddis, an assistant professor of civil society and community studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to discuss the pillars of her research and how school food policy should move forward.(No paywall)

The National Labor Relations Board will publish a proposed rule Friday that would change its definition of a joint employer. The move would reverse an Obama-era decision that had made it easier to hold parent companies, such as restaurant chains, accountable for the labor violations of franchisees.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program, known best for its red, yellow, and green sustainable seafood-rating scheme, is unveiling its first Seafood Slavery Risk Tool today. It’s a database designed to help corporate seafood buyers assess the risk of forced labor, human trafficking, and hazardous child labor in the seafood they purchase. (No paywall)

During his time as House Agriculture chairman a decade ago, Rep. Bob Goodlatte says he learned firsthand that the H-2A agricultural guestworker program is outdated and should be replaced. Now the House Judiciary chairman, Goodlatte says he will sponsor a bill for a new guestworker program that, in addition to foreign workers recruited to work in America, could cover the tens of thousands of undocumented farmworkers already in the country — but with no pathway to permanent legal status.