The Teamsters “won back chicken” at Chipotle. Yes, you read that correctly.

Progressive publication Jacobin published a rather stunning, albeit entertaining, investigative report that doesn’t make its intended case.

The piece details three years of contract negotiations at the lone unionized Chipotle location in Lansing, Michigan. Those workers voted to unionize in 2022, and three years later, the union still didn’t have a contract and couldn’t convince enough workers to authorize a strike. However, the union claims to have scored a victory: “We used our union to win back chicken.”

That’s all? Apparently so. The Chipotle Union of Teamsters (CUT) is “winding down its campaign” on attempting to organize further locations. Further contract negotiations are “indefinitely paused” at the Lansing location, but CUT organizing committee members bragged that the union made a ruckus in accusing management of disallowing poultry in workers’ complimentary meals.

If there's a silver lining for the workers who were convinced to vote union, at least they didn't have to pay Teamsters dues without a first contract, but chicken is a bizarre “win” to brag about.

Speaking of Teamsters flubs, they lost a lawsuit against UPS. 

A federal judge has denied the Teamsters’ request for an injunction to halt UPS’ second driver buyout program, which was designed to offer select drivers a “$150,000 separation payment” for their voluntary resignation. 

The judge also determined that the Teamsters should have taken the matter to arbitration as the union’s Master Contract requires of disputes, although as we’ve seen before, Teamsters chief Sean O’Brien chooses to interpret that contract selectively. 

Previously, O’Brien falsely claimed that UPS “is contractually obligated to create 30,000 Teamsters jobs,” but the truth is that the company only agreed to fill, not create, “at least seventy-five hundred (7500) new full-time jobs from existing part-time jobs” before 2028. 

Additionally, UPS has been upfront about their need to restructure due to higher labor costs and diminishing volume. As a result, the company reduced its headcount “by approximately 48,000 positions” in 2025. That’s a direct result of Teamsters pushing UPS labor costs sky high with a contract leading full-time drivers to earn upwards of $170,000 annually. 

Has O’Brien accepted responsibility for his role in this mess? Of course not.

How did striking NYSNA nurses from the third hospital fare on wages?

The largest nursing strike in New York City history has fully ended with nurses from NewYork-Presbyterian heading back to work after 41 days off the job. That’s a week longer than Mount Sinai and Montefiore nurses were on strike, so how did the holdouts fare on wage boosts? They too received 12% over three years, instead of the union-demanded $220,000 base salaries (up from the current $160,000 average).

As we discussed last week, this is a far cry from union promises and the 18% raises that nurses from these hospitals received the last time they went on strike in 2023. Additionally, these workers went without paychecks for at least a month without guaranteed strike pay from NYSNA, which uses a donation fund and an unclear hardship analysis to distribute these funds.

It’s no wonder that NYC nurses felt “betrayed” by a lack of communication from their union and admitted that they largely went back to work because they were “all out of money.”

Minnesota's “captive audience meeting” ban survived a challenge.

Currently, twelve states have varying degrees of bans against so-called “captive audience meetings,” and employer challenges against these bans are ongoing. This shouldn’t be the case, given Supreme Court precedent of NLRB v. Gissel Packing (1969). In that case, the court ruled that the NLRA protects employers’ First Amendment right under Section 8(c) to engage in these meetings, by which companies have a more level playing field to dispel union fiction about what can and cannot be achieved in bargaining. 

In Minnesota, however, business groups who challenged the law do not have standing to sue, according to a new ruling by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Associated Builders and Contractors and the National Federation of Independent Business had challenged the ban on free speech grounds, but without standing, their arguments can go nowhere.

All is not lost, however. It’s likely that the current business-friendly version of the NLRB will, at some point, roll back the Biden Board’s ban. 

ChatGPT’s entrance into the exam room isn’t impressing doctors.

As we recently told you, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health earlier this year in what it explained was a response to a high demand for answering health questions. Although this tool won’t provide formal diagnoses, this presents privacy implications and could intensify the “Dr. Google” phenomenon that can make it difficult for doctors to convince patients to trust medical professionals’ expertise over online searches.

For those understandable reasons, researchers at Mount Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine are concerned. Their full independent evaluation, available in the Nature Medicine journal, details how ChatGPT Health fails to triage over half the cases that should be, according to physicians, determined to require urgent and/or emergency care. 

However, the researchers “emphasize that the findings do not suggest consumers should abandon AI health tools altogether.” They recognize that these tools are constantly being updated and are evolving, but to sum up: Use chatbots for health purposes with many grains of salt.