On the eve of the election there is strike news.
The campaign ads are non stop.
The press and pundits are focused on the horse race and the polling.
Some of my friends are depressed and despondent.
But that’s because they’re looking at the wrong stories.
I’m following labor news and I’m hyped.
Take the striking Boeing workers, members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.
They have voted down a contract that the national leadership has tried to force on them.
Twice.
Many workers have been furious over that loss for years, and some have said that they felt Boeing had bullied them into agreeing to the freezing of the pension. Workers have also been angry with the leadership of the union’s parent organization, which they say scheduled the vote in a way that supported approval of the offer, prompting a rule change that limited the authority to schedule votes to local union chapters.
Meanwhile, Gothamist reports that nurses at Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan are poised to walk.
About 1,500 nurses are threatening to go on strike at Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side and two of its sister sites in Manhattan if owner Northwell Health doesn’t accede to demands to boost pay and improve staffing.
Unionized nurses at Lenox Hill, Lenox Health Greenwich Village, and Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital said they gave Northwell notice of a potential strike on Wednesday and are planning to walk off the job at 8 a.m. on Nov. 4 if contract negotiations don’t move in the right direction.
At the New York Times the tech workers are also ready to walk out.
With the Times’ election coverage likely to be severely impacted if the digital workers go out, the union has incredible leverage right now.
In a statement announcing the strike authorization, the Tech Guild said that the timing was “no accident” and that “roughly half of the workers in the bargaining unit work on election critical programs.”