Leonard Isenberg: If UTLA was not in bed with LAUSD, they would aggregate the exploding number of cases against teachers for dismissal where LAUSD has violated these teachers’ California Ed.
Rewriting the Social Contract; Making Everybody Hurt
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Carl Bloice: I’m just intrigued these days by how much the people who have a lot have become the most insistent that those below them on the social ladder bear the brunt of paying for capitalism’s current crisis.
Should Public Workers Make Concessions?
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Shamus Cooke: War has been declared on unions and some labor leaders are pretending that they can offer concessions to appease their attackers. Unfortunately, this strategy has failed for years, and is in fact why the right wing felt confident enough to officially declare war.
The Attack on Community Organizing: Who’s Next?
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Randy Shaw: Instead of Obama’s election proving the type of launching point that conservative groups experienced after Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election, community organizing opportunities are less available today than in past decades.
The Value of Collective Bargaining
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Steve Hochstadt: As grass-roots organizations, unions are feared by dictators. All of the world’s dictatorships, whether left or right, have banned free unions.
MLK’s Fight For Unions Still Essential
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Michael Honey: In light of the clash of wills in Wisconsin, we should remember the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. One of King’s slogans that we rarely hear is this one: “all labor has dignity.”
Why All Workers Should Support Unions
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Shamus Cooke: Thanks to years of right-wing propaganda — and labor union inertia — millions of Americans are “union skeptics,” unsure as to the nature of the union animal.
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Municipal Workers
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Joseph Palermo: I cannot believe that in the 21st Century we are having this kind of a debate on the role of labor unions in this country. But I suppose it isn’t surprising since we have a new Gilded Age going on.
Ironically, Anti-Union Republicans Need Unions
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Walter Brasch: The unions had already said they would accept what amounts to an 8 percent cut. But, Walker, acting more like a caricature of a Fat Cat Boss, refused to negotiate. His demands, if put into law, would essentially “gut” public worker unions.
How to Win in Wisconsin and Beyond
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Shamus Cooke: Democrats all over the country are cooperating with Republicans in launching a massive attack on the wages and benefits of public employees, scapegoating them for the deficits caused by Wall Street’s recession and the corporate sector in general, the real “base” of the Democrats.
D-Day For Public Employees
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Joseph Palermo: With the aggressive onslaught aimed at public employees and their unions that Republican governors have unleashed in recent weeks, it’s long past time for politicians calling themselves “Democrats” to push aside the anti-labor elements inside their party and stand up for basic worker protections.
Requiem for the American Worker
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Bill Londrigan: We can look back and see the carnage that the corporate war on workers and their unions has wrought: a decline in wages, benefits, unions and jobs–while corporations and the wealthiest one-percent have amassed the largest concentrations of wealth in history.
Poison Populism: Rand Paul’s Tea Party Brew
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Bill Londrigan: While some observers have attempted to portray the Tea Party as a populist uprising against the prevailing powers, traditional populist movements support workers’ right to organize. Questions about where the Tea Party stands on workers’ right to organize and collectively bargain for better wages and benefits have now been put to rest – and they are far from any notion of populism!
As Labor Faces Turning Point, UNITE HERE National Convention Opens
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UNITE HERE, best known for its Hotel Workers Rising campaign and successful organizing of the nation’s gaming industry, opens its national convention in Chicago today. When the event was scheduled, it seemed a perfect occasion for celebrating five years of increased union membership in its core jurisdictions, despite tough economic times. Instead, UNITE HERE’s celebration [...]
Posters Show the Labor Movement At its Best
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When I receive a book for review, I quickly skim through it before putting it aside for future reading. But when I got Lincoln Cushing & Timothy W. Drescher’s, Agitate! Educate! Organize! American Labor Posters, I became so engrossed in its collection of historic labor posters that I could not put it down. Many readers [...]
Key Leaders Endorse National Labor Justice Campaign
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Among the many labor, community, and academic leaders backing the proposal are John Wilhelm, International President of the Hospitality Division of UNITE-HERE, Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton, Archdiocese of Detroit, and the Reverend Alexia Salvatierra, Executive Director of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice. That over 500 prominent activists and politicians from over 30 states [...]
Beyond the Fields: Yes We Can!
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In spite of the victory we had on November 4th, the fight for social and economic justice in the United States is far from over. Barack Obama has emphasized the need for all of us to pitch in and make this country better. His administration has opened the lines of communication to everyday Americans by [...]
Why We Need to Revitalize the Union Movement
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Sixty years ago, in the wake of Nazi genocide and World War Two’s unspeakable atrocities, Eleanor Roosevelt crafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This historic document, adopted by the United Nations on December 10, 1948, declared that rights adhered to all persons, no matter their place of birth, race, gender, or religion.
Why Union Organizing Often Fails
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lame for declining union membership is usually attributed to structural changes in the economy, increased globalization, and unions’ failure to devote adequate resources to organizing. But a recent union drive at a private college in South Florida tells a much different, and far too typical, story. It is an account of immigrant workers who got [...]
Si Se Puede: Anti-Labor Legislation
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Once again the Bush Administration and Congress are shilling for big business at the expense of labor. Labor much like capital is ruled by the law of supply and demand. According to the UFW website , last month more than 5,000 UFW supporters sent e-faxes to the Department of Labor (DOL) telling them instead of [...]
Fighting for Fair Wages
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Fighting for Fair Wages While the subject of the vanishing middle class has gained traction in recent years, there is an equally unnerving phenomenon that is keeping step even though it doesn’t get quite the same level of attention. That’s the plight of the working poor. Until recently, the term “working poor” did not have [...]
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Report from an Unclear Front
Bob Letcher: In the face of last year’s healthcare reform efforts, opponents screamed the inherently violent and hardly constructive “Kill the bill”; now, it’s opponents of reducing collective bargaining rights for public employees who are screaming the still inherently violent and hardly constructive “Kill the bill”.