NEWS

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The NLRB filed a petition in a U.S. District Court on May 10, 2022 requesting courts force the employer to "cease and desist" unfair labor practice and immediately rehire the seven workers back.

Employees at a Buffalo-area Starbucks have voted to form a union on Dec 12, 2021, making it the first of the nearly 9,000 company-owned stores in the United States to be organized and highlighting an important symbolic victory for labor at a time when workers across the country are expressing frustration with wages and working conditions. 

Derrick Palmer, in pink, and Christian Smalls, right, celebrated after workers voted to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island on April 20, 2022. 

Following a recent trend of service workers organizing at companies like Starbucks, Apple and Amazon, employees at a Trader Joe’s in Hadley, Mass., voted to unionize on July 28, 2022.
 

After Oxford, Brisack didn’t vie for a Yale law degree like Clinton, or a cushy consulting gig like Buttigieg. Instead, she got a job at the Elmwood Avenue Starbucks in Buffalo, NY. A year later, she organized the first successful organization among staff of a corporate-owned Starbucks store in the United States. 

Apple employees at a Baltimore-area store have voted to unionize on June 18, 2022, making it the first of the company’s 270-plus stores in the United States to join a trend in labor organizing sweeping through retailers, restaurants and tech companies. 

Since the Great Recession, the college-educated have taken more frontline jobs at companies like Starbucks and Amazon. Now they’re helping to unionize them. 

Our companies deal individually with their own labor and personnel decisions (except for the selection of the CEO), Buffett said in a letter back to Sanders in Dec 2021. We have never purchased or sold a company because of its union or non-union status. Some of our companies have as many as a dozen unions; others have none.

As America slouches toward plutocracy, our problem isn’t the virtue level of billionaires. It’s a set of social arrangements that make it possible for anyone to gain and guard and keep so much wealth, even as millions of others lack for food, work, housing, health, connectivity, education, dignity and the occasion to pursue their happiness. 

A Pennsylvania mortgage company owned by billionaire businessman Warren Buffett, discriminated against potential Black and Latino homebuyers in Philadelphia, New Jersey and Delaware, the Department of Justice said on July 27, 2022, in what is being called the second-largest redlining settlement in history.