Amie Rivers

A large Marshalltown employer will lay off more than a hundred people—in the very city where the company began. Lennox Industries will lay off 114 workers on Jan. 16, according to Iowa’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act website. The company is Marshalltown’s third-largest employer, with 915 total employees. Many are unionized with the United…

More than 400 manufacturing workers who have been striking since May 2 will get the chance to vote on a possible contract for the first time this weekend. United Auto Workers (UAW) released a statement Monday saying they had finally received an offer from Case New Holland International (CNHi) that negotiators considered acceptable enough to…

Ninoska Campos is a force to be reckoned with. She speaks little English, but is a native Spanish speaker—a language spoken by many immigrant meatpacking and farm workers in many southeastern Iowa manufacturing towns. Over the past year and a half, she has rallied those workers, bringing them to local meetings and encouraging them to…

If you took a class at the University of Iowa lately, it’s likely that class was taught not by a full-time professor, but by a graduate student teaching assistant. That’s common across many large research universities in the US. But those graduate students are making very little money for their outsized efforts, says Hannah Zadeh,…

Iowa remains one of the states least friendly to labor organizing and worker power. But the cracks are starting to show. Iowa workers filed 14 representation cases with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in the 2022 fiscal year, an increase of 180% compared to the previous fiscal year, according to the Economic Policy Institute…

Priscilla Cunningham has been living at the Salvation Army’s homeless shelter in Waterloo for months, trying to get out. During the day, she calls rental companies around Waterloo, asking them about places to rent, taking down names, phone numbers, and the amount of rent they’re asking. Over and over, she finds out suitable places won’t…

As a massive rail strike draws closer, rail unions lambasted a statement President Joe Biden put out Monday asking Congress to impose the agreement, even as the majority of the workforce has rejected it. “I am calling on Congress to pass legislation immediately to adopt the Tentative Agreement between railroad workers and operators—without any modifications…

Higher food prices and missing paychecks are a recipe for a tough holiday season for hundreds of striking workers in Iowa. However, their unions and community supporters are trying to make it all a little easier on them. BCTGM strike in Cedar Rapids The roughly 100 BCTGM Local 100-G workers holding the line at Ingredion…

Paralympian gold medalist and Democrat Josh Turek hung onto his Iowa House District 20 win by just six votes after a recount requested by his Republican opponent Sarah Abdouch. According to Pottawattamie County’s official canvass last week, Turek had 3,404 votes to Abdouch’s 3,397. Abdouch then requested a recount, which was completed this week, Pottawattamie…

The good news: BCTGM unionized workers at the Ingredion milling plant in Cedar Rapids are just four or five negotiating proposals away from having a new agreement, more than 100 days after beginning their strike. The bad news: They’re likely to continue striking at least through the Thanksgiving holiday. That’s according to local union president…