r/union

I've been reading about some non profits unionizing and was wondering if anyone has had experience with it? Given that a non-profit theoretically only has so much money to shell out, what were the big asks at the table? Was it less so monetary items and more language, seniority rights, vacation?

Pretty niche question but throwing it out there!

This seems like a simple and stupid question but I am just not able to get a clear answer on my own despite several attempts and asking several people in person who I thought would know. Part of the problem may just be how rare IT unions are? The examples Ive found online tend to be for places like Google, whereas we are IT people within a non-tech company.

Several people on my team at work are interested in joining a union. Our boss actually quietly supports it. The confusion is we don't work for a tech company, but are IT people at a non-profit (with other unionized divisions, fields that are more traditionally union). We dont really get how many people are needed to sign on for a union to be legitimate. We all assume there is a certain level of manager where you have to get most of the people to sign.

The numbers are made up, but proportionally correct:

100,000 - Entire company (Other divisions are unionized, we would be far from first)
2,000 - All of IT people
100 - Everyone reporting to our SVP
40 - Everyone reporting to our VP
20 - Everyone reporting to our manager (who quietly supports it, and where probably most of us like the idea).

A little direction would be much appreciated. Knowing the structure, is there a specific number of people we have to get in support? Are we going about this all backwards, should we be picking a union first and working with them before worrying about support?

This will be a long post, and because I'm not sure if I could face any backlash, as I am a steward, I'll be trying to avoid identifying details.

Edit to include info asked for by the bot: USA, Private company contracted federally, Aviation.

My worksite has been unionized for about 6 months, and from the very beginning, things have seemed like they were being done wrong. We were given many, many promises of all the benefits we would receive, including a major raise, sick leave, a better 401k policy, lower insurance premiums, more benefits for people opting out of healthcare, and several other small things. All of these things were repeated again and again from our bargaining team.

They decided to vote on the union without telling anyone. The vote was announced the day of, and anyone who wasn't there didn't get to vote. I came in late that day, so I never voted. The vote was around 95% for unionizing, so they began negotiating.

Eventually, we're sent out a CBA for us to look over and vote on. We didn't get nearly anything that we wanted. Our raise was 2%, which was much lower than what was promised, and despite thinking what was promised was too high, it was still lower than I expected. The raises laid out for the following years are 3% and 5%, however due to the nature of our work, majority of the site will be laid off before we actually get there.

The 401k is technically better, as it was already far below the average at around 1.5%, and it has now been raised to about 2.5%.

Benefits for people that don't take the healthcare barely went up, while taking away the dump that the other people usually got once a year. The company is now paying less than it was before to the employees.

We did get sick leave, however in one year, the company will be required to give us sick leave by law, so yes, it was a benefit, but one we'd have gotten naturally in a year.

When they decided to vote on the CBA, half of the site was out on a detachment. Rather than wait, they sent 2 members of the negotiating team to the detachment site, and when they got there, they got very angry about the poor reception of the CBA, lied some more about what was in it and what it meant, and then told everyone they didn't have enough time for questions and that we need to vote.

The vote passed the CBA with a suspiciously high amount of yesses. I knew of more people on the detachment site alone that said no than they counted across both sites. But, I can't prove it, so we can't do anything about it.

I come home to find out that some people felt threatened by their shop lead, a negotiator, to vote yes, or they'd face consequences. They refuse to step forward, so I can't do anything about it.

Finally, we get the ratified CBA, and it's not the same one that we voted on. They claim that we voted on a "Tentative Agreement," so they were allowed to change anything that wasn't in the highlight page they sent along with the draft. No one was told this was the case, and we lost inclement weather pay because of the changes.

Votes for stewards began, and I ran because I know that unions can be great, but the people leading this one are not. I was voted in with a larger amount of votes than I would've expected.

We sat down with all our stewards, on site management, 2 people from the union, and one person from the company, the "VP of employee relations(?)," in order to talk about the CBA and clarify anything. What it turned into was the VP cutting everyone off, not letting us complete questions, and skimming over the CBA. The VP and our higher up in the union knew each other, and the union man was clearly under the foot of the VP. At one point. the union man was starting to explain something, and the VP just raised his hand toward the union guy's face and went "No, I'm going to talk." and continued to give a non-answer to the question being asked.

We're now at the point that we're trying to enforce parts of the CBA, and our chief steward is continuously claiming that the CBA doesn't say what it says, and that it's not up for personal interpretation. Some things I understand, and can see how it can be misinterpreted in a way that isn't intended. But more recently, it has become an issue with things in the CBA that are clearly written, but when confronted, the chief claims that it's wrong and won't give any clarification on what it actually means. When I try to reach above him, and get answers from someone higher in the union, I'm told to talk to the chief.

I don't know what to do at this point. Nearly everyone on site feels slighted, and I have little doubt that a fair vote would abolish the union.

There's more issues that have come up, but this post is already too long. If anyone can give me any advice on how to handle this, I would really, really appreciate it. I loved this job before the union, and now I'm looking at leaving because of it.

Samsung makes about a third of the world’s DRAM—the memory inside virtually every phone, laptop, server, and data center on the planet. Together with its Korean rival SK Hynix, it controls roughly two-thirds of the global DRAM market and an even larger share of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the specialized chips that AI systems cannot run without. Samsung and SK Hynix are two of only three companies that make HBM at all; the third being American semiconductor company Micron.

When people talk about AI infrastructure, they tend to focus on Nvidia’s GPUs. But those GPUs are useless without the memory chips stacked alongside them, and Samsung’s three fabrication complexes in South Korea are among the most important pieces of the AI industrial boom. Samsung operates 12 fabrication lines, employs over 260,000 people worldwide, and is investing $73 billion in semiconductor capex and R&D this year alone, the largest single-year chip investment by any company in history.

That’s why it’ll be a shock to the system when on May 21, nearly 45,000 of Samsung’s unionized workers plan to walk off the job for 18 days. If that happens, it will be the largest work stoppage in the history of the semiconductor industry, at the single most important chokepoint in the AI supply chain. But unlike past labor disputes, AI hyperscalers won’t be able to absorb a supply disruption.

Last September, SK Hynix settled with its own union to allocate 10% of annual operating profit directly to employees as performance bonuses for the next decade, while removing caps on bonuses. Based on 2026 profit forecasts, that translates to average payouts of $460,000-$477,000 per worker this year across SK Hynix’s 35,000 staff, with projections approaching $900,000 per person next year. This is nothing new for SK Hynix: it already paid profit-sharing bonuses averaging about $95,000 per employee this past February.

Now, Samsung’s unions are requesting 15% of operating profit be allocated to a bonus pool, removal of the current cap that limits bonuses to 50% of base salary, and a 7% wage hike. Management countered with roughly 13% of operating profit, but only as a one-time payment for 2026, and didn’t commit to permanent structural changes.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/05/17/labor-strike-samsung-ai-hbm-chips-dividend-revolution-memory/?utm_source=reddit/

Overtime Policy Overhaul| Pulling Demographic Reports
Parker Purifoy: The 2024 overtime rule officially died last week. But the question remains if the Department of Labor will do anything further with the standard.

The DOL’s technical amendment to its regulation on who qualifies for time-and-a-half wages withdrew the Biden-era policy which, if it had gone into effect, would have made four million more workers eligible for overtime.
It raised the exemption threshold to $58,656 for white-collar workers but was struck down by two Texas federal judges who found the move to be beyond the department’s authority.
Jim Paretti, an employer-side attorney with Littler Mendelson PC, said the decision to formalize the rule’s nullification didn’t change things for employers. But, he said, it did raise questions about whether the DOL, under acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, would work to put their own stamp on the regulation.
Last week’s rescission put back in place the final rule from 2019 setting the salary threshold at $35,568.
The move comes after the Trump administration pushed heavily for no taxes on overtime wages or tips in 2025.

The department may feel more constrained in blazing new territory because of those 2024 court orders and similar legal challenges to the Obama-era attempt to raise the salary threshold.

But the DOL could examine the work-duties portion of the test exempting an employee if they’re a “bona fide executive, administrative, or professional.” That portion of the test hasn’t been substantially updated in many years, Paretti said.

“But changing the duties test would be fundamentally changing the nature of the exemption,” he said. “So whether they have the taste for that, we’ll see.”
Worker advocates decried the rescission. Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, said in a statement that the move was “unsustainable for the country.”

“The Trump administration just told 4 million workers they don’t deserve to be fully paid for the hours they work,” she said. “Costs are rising, everything is too expensive, and this administration wants to keep wages as low as possible.

Paul Sonn, state policy program director at the National Employment Law Project, also pointed to rising costs of living.

“This short-sighted action is only going to worsen the affordability crisis. And gimmicks like Trump’s ‘no-tax-on-overtime’ are of little benefit to workers who are stripped of their overtime pay rights,” he said in a statement.

Rebecca Klar: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission submitted a regulatory plan for White House review that would withdraw workforce demographic disclosure requirements for many private companies, as well as for unions, schools, and local governments.

The sweeping rescission proposal hasn’t been published yet in full. So far it doesn’t appear targeted toward a segment of the workforce that’s gotten a lot of attention from the Trump administration: federal employees.
At least one prominent administration official has spoken on this issue.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau acting Director Russell Vought told the EEOC that its annual call for agencies to submit data on their workforce’s demographics conflicts with President Donald Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders.

Vought, also director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, urged the agency to review and revise its report in a message shared publicly along with the CFPB’s submission of its annual MD-715 report.

MD-715 is the management directive requiring federal agencies to submit dataon their workforces by race, ethnicity, and sex, as well as EEO programs that, in part, show a proactive prevention of discrimination.
Republican EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas has broadly acted in coordination with the Trump administration’s broader efforts to scrutinize diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the federal government and private sector.
Given Vought’s proximity to the White House as OMB director and the EEOC’s actions in lockstep with the administration, shifts in the EEOC’s demographic data collection for the federal workforce could be down the line when the agency renews its forms for the process, said Fred Satterwhite, a principal consultant with DCI.

“It’s not like the EEOC has been a rogue part of the executive branch and CFPB had to point out to them they were disobeying,” Satterwhite said.
Vought’s message said that certain aspects of MD-715 appear to conflict with Trump’s orders, such as asking agencies to report whether their EEO policy statement addresses “gender identity” as a protected basis, and whether their strategic plans reference “diversity and inclusion principles.”
MD-715 has been in place for more than two decades, with earlier forms of similar collections dating back to the 1980s before it, Satterwhite said.
The commission must renew its data collection process every few years by submitting it to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, part of Vought’s OMB.

The current approved version of management directive is set to expire at the end of September, Satterwhite said.
“This may flow into future activity by the EEOC as part of ongoing synchronization between the commission and the White House,” he said.

The EEOC’s notice Thursday also includes proposed rescissions to reporting requirements under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but it’s not clear if that will directly impact MD-715.

An EEOC spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Im a relatively new shop steward, and I’m making some moves, filing grievances and not taking management’s rage bait despite the stonewalling and gaslighting they’re throwing at me. I am frustratingly tenacious, but it’s starting to feel like they’re trying to break me. I tell myself, “don’t let up now, cracks are forming”, but I sometimes doubt if it’s true.

I’ve consistently been a top performer in my workplace, earned tons of praise from immediate managers, and am well liked across many departments. That being said, I can feel the subtle retaliation. Holding up funding for projects I’m involved with, trying to take away my influence, etc.

In practice, how does a steward leverage their influence and position to enact real change? What have you seen that tipped the scales in favor of workers pitted against a toxic public sector environment that protects corruption?

Denver City Council is voting on a data center moratorium tonight. Community members gathered to voice their support of the moratorium and push for an outright ban. 58 people showed up to comment, most in support of the moratorium and opposition to data centers...

Shockingly, it's people from DALF, claiming to officially represent DALF, that defended data centers...

Interested to hear from others at DALF or AFL-CIO to know if Jon Alvino's supportive stance on data centers truly represents the views of the unions that DALF represents.

I’m an RN in California and recently had to call out after being involved in a motor vehicle accident on the way to my shift. I currently have only 9 sick hours, and my manager told me the rest would be leave without pay and that if I call out again I could face disciplinary action. I’m contacting my union rep, but I wanted to ask if anyone has experience with whether car accidents/emergencies are usually treated differently under attendance policies or union contracts. I was not hospitalized but did not feel safe working bedside afterward. Any advice on documentation or what to say/not say to management?
I contacted my doctor for a possible work note & emailed a CNA rep for advice as well and waiting on a response.