Sharon Block

Dysfunction in the Covid-era workforce has reached a fever pitch. If you’ve talked to anyone about work in the last month, you’ve probably discussed quiet…

The Polk County Professional Firefighters union is in the throes of its final weeks of bargaining before its current contract expires at the end of…

Union railworkers in the United States scored a potential key victory in their fight for improved pay and working conditions on Thursday in what could…

NPR – Historically, building a union in the United States has been a grassroots process. For example, while workers at one Chipotle may succeed in…

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U.S. labor unions enjoy their highest level of approval in almost 60 years, as high-profile worker victories at Amazon and Starbucks have galvanized public support.

Across the country, labor unions have celebrated recent victories at companies like Starbucks and John Deere. However, union membership rates have dropped to a historic…

A slew of unionizing efforts at companies across Massachusetts reflects a national labor trend and a shift in attitudes about unions. Last month, workers voted…

Workers at a Chipotle outlet in Lansing, Michigan, and an REI in Berkeley, California, voted to unionize this week. They’re the latest of hundreds of…

The fate of President Joe Biden’s agenda could soon rest with the administrator of a tiny office deep within the White House. But first, Biden…

The Independent Amazon Labor Union (ALU) scored a surprise victory last month when it successfully unionized the first Amazon warehouse in the U.S. on Staten Island, New York. Now, the grassroots organization is trying to prove that it can notch more victories against the retail megalith. The voting results at a second Staten Island facility today, though, proves that winning maybe an uphill battle. ... Regardless of today’s loss, the unprecedented nature of the first victory will likely keep the movement energized. “[Workers] were told that Amazon was too big, that the company's pushback would be too fierce, that an independent union can't mount a big enough campaign,” Sharon Block, executive director of the labor and worklife program at Harvard University’s law school, told Fortune. “But now, no one can say that anymore.”

The recent deluge of union elections at Starbucks Corp. stores is pushing the federal labor board to its limit, reflecting a broader influx in labor action as the pandemic winds down. Flat funding and a restless labor force have created a near perfect storm for the National Labor Relations Board, charged with overseeing every private-sector union election. Election petitions have already swelled by 57% in the first half of the 2021 fiscal year as unfair labor practice charges rose by 14%. At the same time, ballooning inflation and long-term staff declines have made the agency less equipped to fulfill its statutory mission of overseeing union elections, current and former officials say. “The board certainly has been in a funding crisis for awhile,” said Sharon Block, who served on it during the Obama administration and more recently as the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under President Joe Biden.

The organizing campaign at Starbucks has succeeded in unionizing nearly 20 of the coffee chain’s U.S. stores so far, a historic breakthrough for the labor movement. But the union effort is now in the early stages of an even heavier lift: negotiating a first contract. Starbucks has every incentive not to offer the workers a satisfactory deal, since that would only encourage more workers to organize. From the perspective of the union, Workers United, securing solid gains in a collective bargaining agreement could turbocharge an already hot organizing drive, and bring many more of Starbucks’ 9,000 corporate-owned U.S. stores into the fold. Both sides are now girding for what’s likely to be a bruising fight at the negotiating table, one that could ultimately determine the future of unions inside Starbucks. ... Sharon Block, a labor law professor at Harvard University and former official in the Biden White House, said the brand dynamic is “hard to quantify,” but reputable considerations must figure into Starbucks’ calculus. “I imagine it weighs on their decision-making,” she said. “It isn’t just about doing the [financial] math.” If workers can successfully organize hundreds of stores, there may be a point in which Starbucks finds it in the company’s interest to acknowledge itself as a union employer and bargain accordingly, rather than continue to wage a battle at every store where a union petition pops up.

Fresh off their historic win against online retailer Amazon, Staten Island warehouse workers who voted to form a union earlier this month are loading up their arsenal as the internet behemoth ratchets up its defenses against the upstart group. Amazon has filed more than two dozen objections with the National Labor Relations Board and seeks to overturn the Amazon Labor Union victory at the Staten Island JFK8 warehouse. The company argues that the union intimidated workers into voting in favor of organizing and alleges that the federal agency gave the ALU preferential treatment by filing a lawsuit against the internet retailer ahead of the vote. ... “Amazon, I think, has demonstrated that they are willing to go to great lengths to prevent their workers from having a union,” [Sharon] Block said. “And because the incentives in the law are to play this out as long as possible, if you’re a company that mistakenly but nevertheless believes that you want to keep the union out of your workplace, the law provides a path for you that is essentially costless to push the date out as much as possible.”

Amazon (AMZN) warehouse workers at a Staten Island, N.Y., facility on Friday established the first U.S. union in the company's 28-year history, delivering a blow to the e-commerce giant and intensifying a wave of labor organizing nationwide. The astonishing victory of a worker-led, crowdfunded union over the nation's second-largest employer became an immediate symbol for resurgent worker strength. But for now, a symbol is just about all that it is. ... Federal law requires employers to bargain with representatives of unionized employees in "good faith," but the penalties for violating the law are "negligible at best," said Sharon Block, a former Biden administration official and the executive director of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program.

Two years ago, on the day Christian Smalls led a walkout demanding better Covid safety protections at his Amazon.com Inc. warehouse in New York City, the company fired him, saying he himself violated safety rules. There were some copycat protests scattered around the country shortly afterward, and the company’s public relations took a hit, but its grip on its labor relations appeared very much intact. For longtime labor advocates, Smalls’s firing seemed like one more example of a targeted dismissal that achieves its goal of scaring other workers away from organizing, even if it gets reversed. ... ALU could still fail to get any further with Amazon, and the company could prevail in the rematch slated to occur at a second Staten Island warehouse later in April. Overall U.S. unionization declined last year, despite 2021’s wave of prominent strike authorizations, mass resignations, and other organizing efforts. But Smalls’s win signals that there’s an opening for workers, one that many others are now more likely to explore. “The psychological and symbolic importance of a win can’t be overstated,” says Sharon Block, a former Obama Labor Department policy chief who now directs Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program. “The wonderful thing about the beginning of a wave is that you don’t know that it’s a wave.” —With Michael Tobin and Matt Day

In just a few short years, Amazon’s warehouse workers have gone from suffering in silence to jobsite walkouts in Minnesota and more recently a full-blown union vote in Alabama. Now it seems another segment of Amazon’s workforce is taking its first steps towards advocating for better conditions. In an informal driver-led survey shared with Gizmodo, hundreds of U.S. and Canada-based delivery drivers—who transport packages for but are technically not employed by Amazon—describe constant surveillance, to-the-second time crunches, and accelerated work with stagnant pay. And the vast majority say they’d like to unionize...Harvard professor and labor rights expert Benjamin Sachs advocates for a complete overhaul of FDR-era labor law in order to accommodate such non-employee-employees. (See his “Clean Slate” agenda, designed with former National Labor Relations Board member Sharon Block.) In the shorter term, he said, the National Labor Relations Board could authorize states to allow sectoral bargaining, an expansive bargaining system more common in Europe, which allows workers to bargain with multiple employers so long as they’re performing work in the same sector. “You can franchise and subcontract anything,” Sachs told Gizmodo over the phone. “More and more companies are getting away with these games that have enormous human costs, that allow companies to maintain control and profits while shedding all responsibility to the workforce.”