Rebecca Brand: From corporate tax breaks to immigration reform to environmental protections and health care, we’re working with hundreds unions across the state to move one of our most aggressive legislative campaigns in California history.
What Activists (Should Have) Learned in 2012
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Randy Shaw: Activists are in far better spirits than one year ago. Progressives see that the public is on their side, and, unlike in the aftermath of the 2008 elections, are staying engaged in the major policy struggles that elections are supposed to be all about.
Occupy Should Stay Unattached to Political Parties
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Mark Nathan: We need grassroots social movements of such force that it will reinvent what is possible in mainstream American politics. The Occupy movements have started such a process.
The City of Second Chances
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Julie Gutman: On Labor Day, Let’s Celebrate L.A.’s Status as a Bastion of Human, Immigrant and Workers’ Rights
What Activists Can Learn from Schwarzenegger and Obama
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Randy Shaw: Why did California progressives do so well in the midterm elections, in contrast to conservatives’ success nationally? A major reason is that the state’s activists pushed progressive policies without seeking approval from politicians.
Lessons of the UNITE HERE-SEIU Deal
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Randy Shaw: The SEIU-UNITE HERE conflict also shows the peril of veteran labor leaders quietly deferring to destructive decisions by top union officials, a lesson that was supposed to have been learned from activists’ experience with Cesar Chavez and the UFW in the 1970’s.
Despise the Initiative Process? New York City Shows Why Progressives Need It
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New York City provides a case study of a large, ethnically diverse, California-like entity where citizen ballot measures are not an option. The result? A profoundly undemocratic city where large real estate developers call the shots.
Labor Day, 2009: Picnics, Parades, and a Pinch of Protest
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We are in a situation in America where the working class, and in particular the union working class, has shrunk to the lowest point its ever been, and this is the reality we are going to have to face in a global economy…We’re talking about a Global Labor Movement and that’s the only way American workers are going to survive.
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 [...]
Rally for Real Health Care Reform in Los Angeles
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With the final White House Forum on healthcare scheduled Monday, April 6, in downtown Los Angeles, advocates of single payer/guaranteed healthcare have one more opportunity to shake up what has become a dreary conventional wisdom about the presumed acceptable parameters of the debate. Hundreds of nurses, doctors, healthcare and labor activists will rally at 9 [...]
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.
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