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    How TV Writing Became a Dead-End Job

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    The writers say Hollywood studios are increasingly limiting their roles in television productions, highlighting a trend for white-collar workers.For the six years he worked on “The Mentalist,” beginning in 2009, Jordan Harper’s job was far more than a writing gig. He and his colleagues in the writers’ room of the weekly CBS drama were heavily involved in production. They weighed in on costumes and props, lingered on the set, provided feedback to actors and directors. The job lasted most of a year.But by 2018, when he worked on “Hightown,” a drama for Starz, the business of television writing had changed substantially. The writers spent about 20 weeks cranking out scripts, at which point most of their contracts ended, leaving many to scramble for additional work. The job of overseeing the filming and editing fell largely to the showrunner, the writer-producer in charge of a series.“On a show like ‘The Mentalist,’ we’d all go to set,” Mr. Harper said. “Now the other writers are cut free. Only the showrunner and possibly one other writer are kept on board.”The separation between writing and production, increasingly common in the streaming era, is one issue at the heart of the strike begun in May by roughly 11,500 Hollywood writers. They say the new approach requires more frequent job changes, making their work less steady, and has lowered writers’ earnings. Mr. Harper estimated that his income was less than half what it was seven years ago.While their union, the Writers Guild of America, has sought guarantees that each show will employ a minimum number of writers through the production process, the major studios have said such proposals are “incompatible with the creative nature of our industry.” The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of Hollywood studios, declined to comment further.SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union that went on strike last week, said its members had also felt the effects of the streaming era. While many acting jobs had long been shorter than those of writers, the union’s executive director, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, said studios’ “extreme level of efficiency management” had led shows to break roles into smaller chunks and compress character story lines.But Hollywood is far from the only industry to have presided over such changes, which reflect a longer-term pattern: the fracturing of work into “many smaller, more degraded, poorly paid jobs,” as the labor historian Jason Resnikoff has put it.In recent decades, the shift has affected highly trained white-collar workers as well. Large law firms have relatively fewer equity partners and more lawyers off the standard partner track, according to data from ALM, the legal media and intelligence company. Universities employ fewer tenured professors as a share of their faculty and more untenured instructors. Large tech companies hire relatively fewer engineers, while raising armies of temps and contractors to test software, label web pages and do low-level programming.Over time, said Dr. Resnikoff, an assistant professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, “you get this tiered work force of prestige workers and lesser workers” — fewer officers, more grunts. The writers’ experience shows how destabilizing that change can be.The strategy of breaking up complex jobs into simpler, lower-paid tasks has roots in meatpacking and manufacturing. At the turn of the 20th century, automobiles were produced largely in artisanal fashion by small teams of highly skilled “all around” mechanics who helped assemble a variety of components and systems — ignition, axles, transmission.By 1914, Ford Motor had repeatedly divided and subdivided these jobs, spreading more than 150 men across a vast assembly line. The workers typically performed a few simple tasks over and over.For decades, making television shows was similar in some ways to the early days of automaking: A team of writers would be involved in all parts of the production. Many of those who wrote scripts were also on set, and they often helped edit and polish the show into its final form.The “all around” approach had multiple benefits, writers say. Not least: It improved the quality of the show. “You can write a voice in your head, but if you don’t hear it,” said Erica Weiss, a co-showrunner of the CBS series “The Red Line,” “you don’t actually know if it works.”Ms. Weiss said having her writers on the set allowed them to rework lines after the actors’ table read, or rewrite a scene if it was suddenly moved indoors.She and other writers and showrunners said the system also taught young writers how to oversee a show — essentially grooming apprentices to become the master craftspeople of their day.But it is increasingly rare for writers to be on set. As in manufacturing, the job of making television shows is being broken down into more discrete tasks.In most streaming shows, the writers’ contracts expire before the filming begins. And even many cable and network shows now seek to separate writing from production. “It was a good experience, but I didn’t get to go to set,” said Mae Smith, a writer on the final season of the Showtime series “Billions.” “There wasn’t money to pay for me to go, even for an established, seven-season show.”Showtime did not respond to a request for comment. Industry analysts point out that studios have felt a growing need to rein in spending amid the decline of traditional television and pressure from investors to focus on profitability over subscriber growth.In addition to the possible effect on a show’s quality, this shift has affected the livelihoods of writers, who end up working fewer weeks a year. Guild data shows that the typical writer on a network series worked 38 weeks during the season that ended last year, versus 24 weeks on a streaming series — and only 14 weeks if a show had yet to receive a go-ahead. About half of writers now work in streaming, for which almost no original content was made just over a decade ago.Members of the Writers Guild of America have been on strike since May.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesMany have seen their weekly pay dwindle as well. Chris Keyser, a co-chair of the Writers Guild’s negotiating committee, said studios had traditionally paid writers well above the minimum weekly rate negotiated by the union as compensation for their role as producers — that is, for creating a dramatic universe, not just completing narrow assignments.But as studios have severed writing from production, they have pushed writers’ pay closer to the weekly minimum, essentially rolling back compensation for producing. According to the guild, roughly half of writers were paid the weekly minimum rate last year — about $4,000 to $4,500 for a junior writer on a show that has received a go-ahead and about $7,250 for a more senior writer — up from one-third in 2014.Writers also receive residual payments — a type of royalty — when an episode they write is reused, as when it is licensed into syndication, but say opportunities for residuals have narrowed because streamers typically don’t license or sell their shows. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers said in its statement that the writers’ most recent contract had increased residual payments substantially.(Actors receive residuals, too, and say their pay has suffered in other ways: The streaming era creates longer gaps between seasons, during which regular characters aren’t paid but often can’t commit to other projects.)The combination of these changes has upended the writing profession. With writing jobs ending more quickly, even established writers must look for new ones more frequently, throwing them into competition with their less-experienced colleagues. And because more writing jobs pay the minimum, studios have a financial incentive to hire more-established writers over less-established ones, preventing their ascent.“They can get a highly experienced writer for the same price or just a little more,” said Mr. Harper, who considers himself fortunate to have enjoyed success in the industry.Writers also say studios have found ways to limit the duration of their jobs beyond walling them off from production.Many junior writers are hired for a writers’ room only to be “rolled off” before the room ends, leaving a smaller group to finish the season’s scripts, said Bianca Sams, who has worked on shows including the CBS series “Training Day” and the CW program “Charmed.”“If they have to pay you weekly, at a certain point it becomes expensive to keep people,” Ms. Sams said. (The wages of junior writers are tied more closely to weeks of work rather than episodes.)The studios have chafed at writers’ description of their work as “gig” jobs, saying that most are guaranteed a certain number of weeks or episodes, and that they receive substantial health and pension benefits.But many writers fear that the long-term trend is for studios to break up their jobs into ever-smaller pieces that are stitched together by a single showrunner — the way a project manager might knit together software from the work of a variety of programmers. Some worry that eventually writers may be asked to simply rewrite chatbot-generated drafts.“I think the endgame is creating material in the cheapest, most piecemeal, automated way possible,” said Zayd Dohrn, a Writers Guild member who oversees the screen and stage master’s degree program at Northwestern University, “and having one layer of high-level creatives take the cheaply generated material and turn it into something.”He added, “It’s the way coders write code — in the most drone-like way.” More

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    Looming UPS Strike Spurs Some Companies to Rethink Supply Chains

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    Businesses around the country are facing what could be the latest disruption to how they get their goods to their customers in a timely and affordable fashion.Kathryn Keeler and her husband, Stuart de Haaff, own an olive oil company in the hills of central California. The couple spend their days harvesting olives, bottling the oil, labeling the glass bottles and shipping them out, relying primarily on UPS to get their product to kitchens throughout the United States. They are far from alone. UPS handles about a fourth of packages shipped each day in the United States, according to the Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index, many of them for small businesses like Ms. Keeler’s company, Rancho Azul y Oro.But with the labor contract between UPS and 325,000 of its workers expiring at the end of the month and a potential strike looming, business owners around the country are facing what could be the latest in a series of supply chain disruptions they have confronted since the start of the pandemic.Some are pre-emptively turning to FedEx, the next largest private carrier in the United States, or the Postal Service. Others are calling their third-party shippers — firms that work with the likes of UPS, FedEx and DHL to handle their clients’ shipping needs — to ensure that their packages can still get to their final destinations even if there is a strike.The logistical challenge is just one more burden on businesses that have been stretched thin over the past few years.“Maybe a larger business can withstand those types of situations,” Ms. Keeler said. But as small-business owners, she and her husband “don’t have a lot of extra time in our day to be on the phone with the post office or FedEx.”Since 2020, the pandemic has strained the global supply chain in a number of ways. E-commerce reached record levels as stuck-at-home Americans bought clothes, furniture, workout equipment and groceries online. Companies had to navigate Covid-related shutdowns at factories in China and Vietnam. There were worldwide delays when a large container ship got stuck in the Suez Canal, leading to containers piling up at the Port of Los Angeles. Those situations affected the way goods came into the United States.A UPS strike could hobble the way brands move their wares domestically.“This is something that affects us on our home turf, and how do we solve for that?” said Ron Robinson, the chief executive of BeautyStat Cosmetics, which uses UPS to ship its skin care products to retailers like Ulta and Macy’s.One strategy that his team will lean on is trying to bundle packages, sending as many as it can out at once, he said.Switching to another carrier is going to cost some companies.Ryan Culver, the chief executive of Platterful, a monthly charcuterie board subscription service, also uses UPS. Switching over to FedEx Express — necessary to ensure that the meats in his packages reach consumers in time — would cost about $5 to $10 more per delivery.Using FedEx to ship goods can sometimes be more costly for small businesses.Hunter Kerhart for The New York TimesTeri Johnson, the founder of Harlem Candle Company, received an email on June 26 from her third-party shipper about a potential UPS strike. It suggested she switch to FedEx. That will cost her about $2 extra for each candle shipped in the greater New York area. Sending her candles to California will cost even more.“We don’t really have a choice right now,” Ms. Johnson said.FedEx said it was accepting additional volume for a limited time and would assess how much capacity its network could accommodate. “Shippers who are considering shifting volume to FedEx, or are currently in discussions with the company to open a new account, are encouraged to begin shipping with FedEx now,” the company said in a post on its website on Thursday.The Postal Service said in an emailed statement that it “has a strong network, and we have the capacity to deliver what is tendered to us.”Larger companies are relying on sophisticated backup plans that have been tested over the past few years. The pandemic and previous tariff trade wars pushed many major retailers with global supply chains to diversify the countries where their vendors are and the parcel carriers they use.“We’ve been focused on investing in a lot of transportation solutions that allow us to more nimbly move freight between carriers,” said Alexis DePree, the chief supply chain officer at Nordstrom. “We can do that with a lot more flexibility and speed than we were able to in the past.”Some third-party carriers are seeing a boost in their businesses as the possibility of a UPS strike comes into focus for their clients. Stord, a third-party logistics and technology provider based in Atlanta whose clients include apparel makers and consumer-package companies, has been sending emails out telling its clients not to worry. Stord uses a cloud-based platform to offer services like warehousing and fulfillment and handles tens of thousands of their packages a day.By combining the volume of its broad portfolio of client brands and using software to make decisions, Stord has the leverage to better negotiate prices with the large parcel carriers, said Sean Henry, the company’s chief executive.“We’ve been negotiating with FedEx and U.S.P.S. about rates around UPS so our customers don’t have to do that,” he said.Stord said more of its clients had asked it to negotiate with carriers on their behalf. He said that equated to “tens of millions of dollars of annual revenue” for his business.Still, some business owners are not letting the possibility of a UPS strike stress them out just yet.Bill McHenry, president of Widgeteer, which sells cookware to large retailers, said he felt “kind of numb” after navigating the pandemic-related challenges. “I’ve seen a lot of stuff and the stories that I’ve heard and things we’ve had to go through and survive — not just the pricing but the upheaval of thinking you have a container but don’t,” he said.He said the potential rail strike last December had been a bigger concern for him.In the meantime, the possibility that a deal could be reached between UPS and the union that represents its workers, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, remains. The union announced on Wednesday that negotiations had broken down, after previously saying the sides had reached a tentative agreement. If an agreement is not reached, a strike could happen as early as Aug. 1.If that occurs, “we would be collateral damage,” Ms. Keeler said. More

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    Los Angeles Hotel Workers Go on Strike

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    The NewsThousands of hotel workers in Southern California walked off the job on Sunday demanding higher pay and better benefits, just as hordes of tourists descended on the region for the Fourth of July holiday.“Workers have been pent up and frustrated and angry about what’s happened during the pandemic combined with the inability to pay their rent and stay in Los Angeles,” said Kurt Petersen, co-president of Unite Here Local 11, the union representing the workers. “So people feel liberated, it’s Fourth of July, freedom is reigning in Los Angeles and hotel workers are leading that fight.”Representatives for the hotels have said that the union had not been bargaining in good faith, and that leaders were determined to disrupt operations.“The hotels want to continue to provide strong wages, affordable quality family health care and a pension,” Keith Grossman, a spokesman for the coordinated bargaining group consisting of more than 40 Los Angeles and Orange County hotels, said in a statement.The strike is part of a wave of recent labor actions in the nation’s second-largest metropolis, where high costs of living have made it difficult for many workers — from housekeepers to Hollywood writers — to stay afloat.Thousands of hotel workers in Southern California walked off the job, demanding higher pay and better benefits.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesWhy It MattersWorkers across Southern California in a range of industries have threatened to strike or walked off the job in recent months, displaying unusual levels of solidarity with other unions as they push for higher pay and better working conditions.Dockworkers disrupted operations for weeks at the colossal ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach until they reached a tentative deal in June. And screenwriters have been picketing outside the gates of Hollywood studios for about two months.Hugo Soto-Martinez, a Los Angeles City Council member who worked as an organizer for Unite Here Local 11, said that the breadth of industries locked in labor fights demonstrated frustration especially among younger workers, who have seen inequality widen and opportunities evaporate.“It’s homelessness, it’s the cost of housing,” he said. “I think people are understanding those issues in a much more palpable way.”The hotel workers’ strike comes just as the summer tourism season ramps up, and labor leaders say they are hoping to capitalize on that momentum.Last year, tourism in the city reached its highest levels since the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Los Angeles Tourism and Convention Board. Roughly 46 million people visited, and there was $34.5 billion in total business sales in 2022, reaching 91 percent of the record set in 2019.But for many workers like Diana Rios-Sanchez, who works as a housekeeping supervisor at the InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown, the pay has not helped to keep up with inflation.She often wonders how long she and her three children, who live in a one-bedroom apartment in El Sereno, a neighborhood on the Eastside of Los Angeles, can afford to stay in the city.“All we do in hotels is work and work and get by with very little,” Ms. Rios-Sanchez said. “We take care of the tourists, but no one takes care of us.”Business groups say that simply demanding that employers pay workers more does not address the much-deeper problems that have led to sky-high costs of living in California.BackgroundThe union has been negotiating since April for a new contract. In June, members approved a strike.The group has asked that hourly wages, now $20 and $25 for housekeepers, immediately increase by $5, followed by $3 bumps in each subsequent year of a three-year contract.By contrast, Mr. Grossman said in the statement that the hotels had offered to increase pay for housekeepers currently making $25 an hour in Beverly Hills and downtown Los Angeles to more than $31 per hour by January 2027.On Thursday, the Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites, a large hotel in downtown Los Angeles, announced that it had staved off a walkout of its workers with a contract deal.Agreements made this year will set pay levels ahead of the 2026 World Cup and 2028 Olympics, which are expected to be enormous tourist draws to the region.What’s NextMr. Petersen said on Sunday that the strike would go on for “multiple days.” The Hotel Association of Los Angeles had said in a statement that the hotels would be able to continue serving visitors.Anna Betts More

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    L.A. Workers Are Feeling Emboldened as Unions Pressure Employers in California

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    California union members are pressuring employers over wages in one of the nation’s most labor-friendly states.In the two months since they went on strike, screenwriters have become a fixture outside studios in Southern California, signs aloft as the traffic roars past. In many parts of America, theirs would be a lonely vigil.Not in Los Angeles.At the behemoth ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, operations were disrupted for weeks until West Coast dockworkers reached a tentative contract deal in mid-June. Across the city, schools shut down for three days this spring when bus drivers, cafeteria workers and teachers walked out.Now, the union representing some 15,000 hotel workers in Los Angeles is threatening to strike this Fourth of July weekend, just as the summer tourism season ramps up. And more than 160,000 actors are poised to shut down Hollywood productions if they cannot reach a new contract deal later this month.Unions have been embattled nationally, but in California they are having a moment.“We’re calling it the ‘hot labor summer,’” said Lorena Gonzalez, the chief officer of the California Labor Federation, which represents more than 2.1 million union members statewide. “We have sparks and fires everywhere, and we’re not letting it die down in California. We’re fanning the flames.”California has long been a labor stronghold, with Democrats in control of state government and most large cities. Despite a string of labor wins in recent years — including a minimum wage of $15.50 an hour, more than double the federal rate — workers say they are feeling ever more pressure from inflation, housing shortages and technological disruptions.The Unite Here Local 11 union is seeking higher wages and better benefits. Some 15,000 members are threatening to strike at dozens of hotels in Los Angeles.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesThe unemployment rate remains below 5 percent in California, so workers know they have leverage. And numerous contracts are expiring this year, forcing California employers to negotiate with unions as they watch picket lines form daily in Los Angeles. Roughly half of the large work stoppages in 2023 have taken place in the state.On Friday, a major contract for the hotel workers ran out, while the actors’ union said that it would extend its expiring contract through July 12, buying more time to continue negotiations.Hotel workers could walk out as soon as this weekend, however. Operators of hotels might be able to muddle through a short-term walkout, but a longer one could deter tourists from visiting Los Angeles in the busy summer months, and erode the convention business that has rebounded since the beginning of the pandemic, said Kevin Klowden, chief global strategist with the Milken Institute, an economic think tank based in Santa Monica, Calif.Simultaneous strikes of hotel workers, screenwriters and actors would ripple first through Los Angeles businesses that rely on the region’s signature tourism and Hollywood industries. And they could have a broader effect beyond Los Angeles; during the 2007 screenwriters strike, the California economy lost $2.1 billion, according to one estimate.The Hotel Association of Los Angeles said in a statement that it had bargained in good faith and would continue to serve tourists during a walkout. Keith Grossman, a spokesman for the coordinated bargaining group consisting of more than 40 Los Angeles and Orange County hotels, said in a statement that it had offered to increase pay for housekeepers currently making $25 an hour in Beverly Hills and downtown Los Angeles to more than $31 per hour by January 2027.“If there is a strike, it will occur because the union is determined to have one,” Mr. Grossman said. “The hotels want to continue to provide strong wages, affordable quality family health care and a pension.”A recurring theme this year among striking workers has been the unbearable cost of living in Southern California. School employees said in March that they had to take two or three side gigs to afford their bills. Screenwriters have echoed that lament. A University of Southern California survey recently found that 60 percent of local tenants said they were “rent-burdened,” spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing.“How can anyone keep living here?” asked Lucero Ramirez, 37, who has worked as a housekeeper at the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills since 2018. On Thursday, Ms. Ramirez gathered inside an office space near downtown Los Angeles with dozens of other hotel workers represented by Unite Here Local 11 to decorate poster boards and staple together fliers ahead of a planned strike. Earlier that day, the Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites announced that it had staved off a walkout with a contract deal.The union has asked that the hourly wage, now $20 to $25 for housekeepers, immediately increase by $5, followed by $3 bumps in each subsequent year of a three-year contract. Hotel workers — and their employers — are well aware that this deal will set pay levels ahead of the 2026 World Cup and 2028 Olympics, when tourists will flood the region.Ms. Ramirez, who earns $25 an hour, has lived in a rent-controlled, one-bedroom apartment in Hollywood for the past decade, where she pays $1,100 a month. The hot water often goes out, and the flooring in her unit is cracked and decaying, she said.Lucero Ramirez, a housekeeper who’s been working at the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills since 2018.Philip Cheung for The New York Times“The landlord wants me to leave so they can boost the rent,” she said. “They want me out, but I cannot afford to go anywhere else, I would have to leave the city.”Labor power is a function of the electorate in California, where Democrats have nearly a 2-to-1 edge over Republicans, supermajority control of the state Legislature, a lock on state offices — and owe a debt to unions, whose members routinely knock on doors and contribute money to liberal candidates.Next year, voters in California will consider an initiative that would raise the minimum wage to $18 an hour. In Los Angeles, members of the City Council are weighing a plan that would raise the minimum wage for tourism workers to $25 an hour. Maria Elena Durazo, a Democratic state senator and former head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, is carrying legislation that would give all health care workers a $25 minimum hourly wage.Tens of thousands of unionized teachers, bus drivers, cafeteria workers and other employees at the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest district, won major raises this year after their high-profile walkout in March. Smaller labor actions have proliferated as well, including strippers organizing in May at a North Hollywood club, and Amazon drivers walking out in June at a warehouse in Palmdale, Calif. The Los Angeles Dodgers averted a strike by giving ushers, groundskeepers and other workers significant raises.Across the country, union membership as a percentage of the labor force has dropped to a record low of 10.1 percent of employed wage and salary workers. In California, however, such membership rose last year to 16.1 percent of wage and salary workers, compared with 15.9 percent in 2021.“This is a tug of war between inflation and wages,” said Sung Won Sohn, a finance and economics professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. “Inflation has been winning and workers are trying to catch up with inflation that’s been persistent.”Nancy Hoffman Vanyek, the chief executive of the Greater San Fernando Valley Chamber of Commerce, which represents about 400 businesses from one-person operations to Hollywood studios, said that workers should be able to afford to live in Los Angeles. But she said simply forcing employers to pay more was a Band-Aid for a much deeper problem in California.“It’s business that always has to bear the brunt of fixing these issues, when we’re not looking at what’s causing them,” she said. “What’s causing the high cost of living in our state? What’s causing the high cost of housing?”Workers nationally are trying to lock in gains from a job market that has remained tight, as employers brace for a possible recession. Rail workers were on the brink of a strike last year, while employees at manufacturing companies like John Deere and Kellogg went on strike in late 2021.In California, the activism has been further driven by white-collar workers, whose jobs have been threatened by the rise of artificial intelligence and the gig economy.“It’s remarkable, the degree to which they are getting support from other unions,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, who directs the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “There’s a new sense of commonality between the retail clerk who is being told to come in every other day from 3 to 7 p.m. and the screenwriter who is suddenly being offered seven episodes to write and then, goodbye.”Writers and supporters were on strike outside the Paramount Pictures studio in Los Angeles on Wednesday.Morgan Lieberman for The New York Times More

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    Starbucks Union Raises Pressure With Plan to Strike Over Pride Décor

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    Walkouts were called at more than 150 stores in the next week after workers said Pride Month decorations had been banned in some, a claim the company denied.Thousands of workers at organized Starbucks stores across the nation will stage strikes over the next week, their union said on Friday, after workers in some states said management prohibited them from putting up decorations for Pride Month.The company denied the accusations and issued a statement declaring that it “has been and will continue to be at the forefront of supporting the LGBTQIA2+ community.”Starbucks Workers United said employees at more than 150 stores would strike over the company’s labor practices and its “hypocritical treatment of LGBTQIA+ workers.”The union represents about 8,000 of the company’s workers in more than 300 stores.Starbucks workers in a number of stores said this month that they had been told that no decorations for the annual L.G.B.T.Q. celebration, such as rainbow flags, were allowed this year, a shift from previous years. In interviews arranged through their union, workers said the given reasons varied.Starbucks, which has roughly 9,300 corporate-owned stores in the United States, has said decoration policies are often specific to each store.A Starbucks official involved in the response to the union campaign said the company decided last year, after the union campaign began to spread across the country, to be more aggressive in enforcing dress codes and policies on what could be posted in stores. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, attributed the change to concern that many stores would otherwise become inundated with union paraphernalia.But a Starbucks spokeswoman on Friday called the claim “false” and said there had been no change in the company’s guidance on displays and decorations in the past nine years.A corporate statement — over the names of Laxman Narasimhan, the chief executive, and Sara Trilling, executive vice president and president, North America — did not address store-by-store practices. But it noted that for Pride Month, the rainbow flag was being flown over the company’s Seattle headquarters and in thousands of Starbucks stores.“We continue to encourage our store leaders to celebrate with their communities including for U.S. Pride Month in June,” it said.Casey Moore, a union spokeswoman, derided the corporate statement, saying, “Instead of apologizing for there being upper management across the country who made the decision to not allow Pride decorations, they’ve doubled down that it didn’t happen.”In addition to its complaints over the Pride decoration issue, the union said it was striking over the company’s broader response to the organizing campaign, including widespread retaliation against union supporters. The union said in its statement that workers were “demanding that Starbucks negotiate a fair contract with union stores and stop their illegal union-busting campaign.”The company has consistently denied accusations of illegality.Starbucks workers and the union say rules on employee conduct have been enforced more aggressively as a way to intimidate and retaliate against union supporters.“They’re trying to make people feel unwelcome in whatever way possible — through more strict enforcement of the dress code or anything,” said Ms. Moore, the union spokeswoman. “The Pride decorations are another level of that.”In a sweeping ruling in March, a federal administrative law judge found that Starbucks had repeatedly violated labor law by “more strictly enforcing the dress code and personal appearance policy in response to union activity.” The judge also found that the company had more strictly enforced its attendance policy and its policy on soliciting and distributing notices within stores.Starbucks has disputed the findings and is appealing the decision to the National Labor Relations Board in Washington.Unionized Starbucks workers have staged waves of strikes in the last several months over what they say are the company’s delay tactics at the bargaining table and other anti-union tactics like retaliatory firings and store closings. The administrative judge’s ruling in March also found that Starbucks had illegally dismissed seven Buffalo-area workers last year in response to union activity.In April, the labor board issued a complaint accusing the company of failing to bargain in good faith at more than 100 stores. It was one of dozens of complaints tied to labor law violations that the board has issued since the union first filed petitions seeking votes in three Buffalo-area stores in August 2021.The company has denied the accusations and blames the union for bargaining delays, citing the union’s insistence on using video-chat software to broadcast sessions to employees not at the bargaining table.Howard Schultz, shortly after stepping down as Starbucks’ chief executive in March, denied allegations of anti-union conduct in testimony before a Senate committee. More

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    UPS Workers Authorize Teamsters Union to Call Strike

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    A walkout is possible after the contract for more than 325,000 workers expires this summer. Negotiations began in April but have yet to resolve pay.United Parcel Service workers have authorized their union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, to call a strike as soon as Aug. 1, after the current contract expires, the Teamsters announced Friday.The Teamsters represent more than 325,000 UPS employees in the United States, where the company has nearly 450,000 employees overall. The union said 97 percent had voted in favor of strike authorization.Many unions hold such votes to create leverage at the bargaining table, but a much smaller percentage end up following through. “The results do not mean a strike is imminent and do not impact our current business operations in any way,” UPS said in a statement, adding that it was “confident that we will reach an agreement.”A UPS strike could have significant economic fallout. The company handles about one-quarter of the tens of millions of parcels shipped each day in the United States, according to the Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index. And while UPS’s competition has grown in recent years, rivals would be hard-pressed to replace that lost capacity quickly, leaving some customers in the lurch and others facing higher costs.“What happens when you try to stuff 25 percent more food into a stomach that’s 90 percent full?” said Alan Amling, a fellow at the University of Tennessee’s Global Supply Chain Institute and a former UPS executive.The two sides have reached tentative agreements on a number of issues since they began negotiating a national contract in April, most recently on heat safety, including a requirement for air conditioning in new trucks beginning in January and additional fans and venting for existing trucks.But the negotiators have yet to tackle pay increases, which the Teamsters say are overdue amid the company’s strong pandemic-era performance. The company’s adjusted net income increased by more than 70 percent from 2019 to last year.The union has also focused on revisiting pay disparities for a category of driver who typically works on weekends.The UPS chief executive, Carol Tomé, who started in that position in 2020, said on a recent earnings call that UPS was aligned with the union on “several key issues.” She added that outsiders should not put too much stock in the “great deal of noise” that was likely to arise during the negotiation.Looming over the talks is the political standing of the Teamsters’ leader, Sean O’Brien, who during his campaign for the union’s presidency in 2021 repeatedly accused his predecessor, James P. Hoffa, of being overly conciliatory toward employers.Mr. O’Brien complained that Mr. Hoffa had essentially forced a concessionary contract onto UPS workers in 2018 after union members voted down the deal. He criticized his opponent for the presidency, a Hoffa-aligned candidate, for being unlikely to strike.“You already conceded that in your 25-year career, you only struck six times, so UPS knows you’re not going to strike,” Mr. O’Brien said at a candidates’ debate.Mr. O’Brien has largely maintained his aggressive stance on UPS since taking over as president last year. Speaking in October to activists with Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a reformist group that backed his candidacy, Mr. O’Brien vowed that “this UPS agreement is going to be the defining moment in organized labor.”Compensation for UPS drivers is generally higher than pay at the company’s competitors. UPS said that the average full-time delivery driver with four years’ experience makes $42 an hour, and that part-time workers who sort packages make $20 an hour on average after 30 days.The groups receive the same benefits package, which includes health care and pension contributions and is worth about $50,000 a year for full-time drivers, the company says.Beyond overall pay levels, the union has said it wants to eliminate a category of driver created under the 2018 contract.The company said the category was intended for hybrid workers who performed jobs like sorting packages on some days while driving on other days, especially Saturdays, to address the growing demand for weekend delivery.But the Teamsters said these workers never followed the hybrid arrangement and simply drove full time from Tuesday to Saturday, for less pay than other full-time drivers. The company says that the weekend drivers make about 87 percent of the base pay of regular full-time drivers, and that some employees have worked under a hybrid arrangement.In the event of a strike, deliveries to consumers, such as e-commerce orders, would probably be among the first to be disrupted. But experts said the supply chain could suffer, too. Some suppliers would struggle to quickly ship goods like automotive parts to manufacturers, potentially causing production slowdowns.Even a short strike could take a toll on UPS. Many customers long relied exclusively on the company, but that started to change after the Teamsters last went on strike in 1997, Mr. Amling said. After that strike, which lasted just over two weeks, more customers began to work with multiple carriers. The consequences were masked by gains from the rise of e-commerce and fewer competitors to choose from, but the company may not be so fortunate today.Niraj Chokshi More

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    Supreme Court Backs Employer in Suit Over Strike Losses

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    The justices ruled that federal labor law did not block state courts from ruling on a case regarding damage caused when workers walked off the job.The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that federal labor law did not protect a union from potential liability for damage that arose during a strike, and that a state court should resolve questions of liability.The majority found that if accusations by an employer are true, actions during a strike by a local Teamsters union were not even arguably protected by federal law because the union took “affirmative steps to endanger” the employer’s property “rather than reasonable precautions to mitigate that risk.” It asked the state court to decide the merits of the accusations.The opinion, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Brett M. Kavanaugh.Three conservative justices backed more sweeping concurring opinions. A single justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented.Some legal experts had said a union setback in the case would discourage workers from striking by making the union potentially liable for losses that an employer incurred during a work stoppage.“It will definitely lead to more expensive-to-resolve lawsuits against labor unions,” said Charlotte Garden, a law professor at the University of Minnesota who was an author of a brief in support of the union. Professor Garden did note, however, that the decision was less far-reaching in discouraging strike activity than it could have been.Others have argued that the ruling was necessary to prevent workers from intentionally harming an employer’s property, an act not protected by federal labor law, and that such restrictions do not jeopardize the right to strike.“Damages from intentional destruction of property are not inherent to the act of striking,” said Michael O’Neill of the Landmark Legal Foundation, a conservative legal advocacy group that submitted a brief in the case. As a result, Mr. O’Neill said, the law does not shield workers or unions from liability for such damage.The case, Glacier Northwest v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters, No. 21-1449, involved unionized employees of a concrete mixing and pouring company who walked off the job during contract negotiations, leaving wet concrete in their trucks. The employer argued that it suffered substantial monetary losses because the abandoned concrete was unusable.The union argued that it had taken reasonable steps to avoid harming the employer’s property, as federal law requires, because workers kept their trucks running as they walked off the job. That allowed the company to dispose of the concrete without damage to the trucks. The union said the lost concrete amounted to the spoilage of a product, for which unions were not typically held liable.At issue were two key questions. The first was procedural: whether the case should be allowed to go forward in state court, as employers generally prefer. The alternative is that the state court — in this case, Washington — should step aside in favor of the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency responsible for resolving labor disputes.The second question was about what economic damage is acceptable during a strike, and what amounts to vandalism — which federal labor law does not protect — of property or equipment.The two issues are linked because under legal precedent, the labor board is supposed to elbow aside state courts when the alleged actions during the strike are at least “arguably protected” by federal law.The Supreme Court ruled that the union’s actions, as alleged by the employer, were not arguably protected because the spoilage of the product was not merely an indirect result of the strike. Instead, the employer contended in a lawsuit, “the drivers prompted the creation of the perishable product” and then waited until the concrete was inside the trucks before walking off the job.“In so doing, they not only destroyed the concrete but also put Glacier’s trucks in harm’s way,” the majority opinion said. It sent the case back to Washington State court to be litigated.Sean M. O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters, issued a defiant statement after the decision was announced. “The Teamsters will strike any employer, when necessary, no matter their size or the depth of their pockets,” he said.The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said the court “got it right” in ruling that federal law “does not pre-empt state tort claims against a union for intentional destruction of an employer’s property during a labor dispute.”In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas agreed that the Washington State court should be allowed to take up the case. He wrote that in a future case, the Supreme Court should reconsider whether the National Labor Relations Board should have such wide latitude to take the first pass in such cases.Justice Jackson noted in her dissent that the labor board had issued its own complaint since the case was first filed in Washington State. In issuing its complaint, the labor board’s general counsel found that the strike activity was in fact protected. This by definition meant that the activity was “arguably protected,” Justice Jackson wrote, requiring the state court to stand down.The decision, which some experts said could cause unions to reconsider striking or take a more cautious approach when a perishable product could be harmed, followed a series of rulings that appeared to scale back the power of unions and workers.The court ruled in 2018 that companies could prohibit workers from collectively bringing legal actions against their employers, even though the National Labor Relations Act protects workers’ rights to engage in so-called concerted activities.In the same year, the court ruled that public-sector unions could no longer require nonmembers to pay fees that help fund bargaining and other activities that unions do on their behalf.In 2021, the court deemed unconstitutional a California regulation that gave unions access to agricultural employers’ property for recruitment.In interviews, union leaders said that the ruling on Thursday would further tilt an already uneven playing field toward employers, and that it was often not a strike itself but the threat of a strike that helped unions win concessions.“Without the threat of a strike, you have little leverage in negotiations,” said Stuart Appelbaum, the president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which has organized successful strikes.Mr. O’Neill’s group, the Landmark Legal Foundation, argued that a ruling against the employer could have jeopardized the labor peace that the National Labor Relations Act was enacted to assure, “placing workers and the public at risk” by essentially blessing acts of vandalism and sabotage.Unions and workers often deliberately plan strikes to exploit employers’ vulnerability — for example, Amazon workers walked out during the holiday season — and rely on an element of surprise to maximize the economic harm they inflict, and therefore the leverage the union gains.In the near term, unions that are contemplating strikes or already striking, such as unions representing Hollywood writers or United Parcel Service employees whose contract expires this summer, may have to take greater precautions to insulate themselves from legal liability.Such precautions will typically weaken the impact of strikes, said Ms. Garden, the University of Minnesota professor. “You could get unions prophylactically adopting less effective tactics — things like giving advance warning about strike, which gives the employer a lot more time to hire replacement workers,” she said.Other unions may simply decide not to strike at all out of fear of heightened legal exposure, she said.Further out, unions and their political allies may seek to enact legislation that explicitly exempts workers from liability for certain types of economic damage that arise during a strike.“There will be efforts in blue states to make the best of it, to do something protective,” said Sharon Block, a former Biden and Obama administration official who is a professor of practice at Harvard Law School.But even these laws could wind up being challenged before the Supreme Court, experts said.Adam Liptak More

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    French Protesters Rally in Last Angry Push Before Pension Bill Vote

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    Many believe the legislation to raise the retirement age to 64 from 62 will pass Parliament, and they are looking beyond the vote to fight on.PARIS — Hundreds of thousands of French protesters on Wednesday swarmed cities across the country, and striking workers disrupted rail lines and closed schools to protest the government’s plan to raise the legal retirement age, in a final show of force before the contested bill comes to a vote on Thursday.The march — the eighth such national mobilization in two months — and strikes embodied the showdown between two apparently unyielding forces: President Emmanuel Macron, who has been unwavering in his resolve to overhaul pensions, and large crowds of protesters who have vowed to continue the fight even if the bill to raise the retirement age to 64 from 62 passes Parliament — which many believe it will.“Macron has not listened to us, and I’m no longer willing to listen to him,” said Patrick Agman, 59, who was marching in Paris on Wednesday. “I don’t see any other option than blocking the country now.”But it remains unclear what shape the protest movement will take from here, with plenty of room for it either to turn into the kind of unbridled social unrest that France has experienced before or to slowly die out.Even as throngs marched in cities from Le Havre in Normandy to Nice on the French Riviera on Wednesday, a joint committee of lawmakers from both houses of Parliament agreed on a joint version of the pension bill, sending it to a vote on Thursday.While it remained unclear if Mr. Macron had gathered enough support from outside his centrist political party to secure the vote, the prime minister could still use a special constitutional power to push the bill through without a ballot. It’s a tool the government used to pass a budget bill in the fall, but it risks exposing it to a no-confidence motion.Although many French people surveyed expect the bill to pass, opponents of the legislation signaled they intended to keep fighting.Laurent Cipriani/Associated PressIn a sense, the demonstrations on Wednesday were a last call to try to prevent the bill from becoming law. “It’s the last cry, to tell Parliament to not vote for this reform,” Laurent Berger, the head of the country’s largest union, the French Democratic Confederation of Labor, said at the march in Paris.Three-quarters of French people believe the bill will pass, according to a study released by the polling firm Ellabe on Wednesday. And many protesters were looking beyond the vote, convinced that a new wave of demonstrations could force the government to withdraw the law after it is passed.Some teachers said they had already given notice of another strike to their principals. Others said they had saved money in anticipation of future strike-related wage losses.“The goal is really to hold on as long as possible,” said Bénédicte Pelvet, 26, who was demonstrating while holding a cardboard box in which she was collecting money to support striking train workers.All along the march route in Paris, colorful signs, banners and graffiti echoed the determination to continue the fight regardless of the consequences. “Even if it’s with garbage, we’ll get out of this mess,” red graffiti on a wall read, a reference to the heaps of trash that have piled up throughout cities in France because garbage workers have gone on strike.Rémy Boulanger, 56, who has participated in all eight national demonstrations against the pension bill, said anger had grown among protesters toward a government that he said “has turned a deaf ear to our demands.”France relies on payroll taxes to fund the pension system. Mr. Macron has long argued that people must work longer to support retirees who are living longer. But his opponents say the plan will unfairly affect blue-collar workers, who have shorter life expectancies, and they point to other funding solutions, such as taxing the rich.A strike by garbage workers has led to a pileup of trash on French streets.Christophe Archambault/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAbout 70 percent of French people want the protests to continue, and four out of 10 say they should intensify, according to the Ellabe poll.Union leaders have hinted that the mobilization would not stop, but they have yet to reveal their plans. “It’s never too late to be in the street,” Philippe Martinez, the head of the far-left C.G.T union, said on Wednesday.France has a long history of street demonstrations as a means to win, or block, changes. Most recently, the Yellow Vest movement that was born in 2018 led to demonstrations that went on for months and forced the government to withdraw plans to raise fuel taxes. But the last time the French government bowed to demonstrators and withdrew a law that had already passed was in 2006, when a contested youth-jobs contract was repealed.“Redoing 2006 would be ideal,” Mr. Boulanger said. But he acknowledged that a sense of fatigue was spreading among protesters — Wednesday’s protests were smaller than those a week ago. He said he was instead looking to the next presidential election, more than four years away, to bring about change.Other protesters pointed to 1995, when strikes against another pension bill paralyzed France for weeks, forcing the government to abandon its plan to send the proposed law to a vote.Ms. Pelvet, another demonstrator, acknowledged that the unions’ vow to bring the country “to a standstill” last week had failed, with a fair number of trains and public services still operating.“Nobody wants to go home,” Ms. Pelvet said. “But the road ahead is not clear yet.”Catherine Porter More