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Mark Naison: If I dare to dream, I can see where this collaboration between Occupy and Labor might lead—to the unionization of Wal-Mart, to the unionization of McDonalds, to the unionization of financial services workers in the nation’s largest banks.
Sharon Kyle: Kwazi Nkrumah, a long-time civil rights activist, has been arrested in Long Beach where the Occupy Movement was gathering as part of “Occupy the Ports”, a coordinated West Coast port shutdown.
Peter Dreier: If the Occupy Wall Street activists join forces with the unions and community groups, they could catalyze a massive nationwide movement to resist foreclosures and block evictions.
Elizabeth Knipe: The movement to organize labor is filled with colorful characters and none more so than those who led the International Workers of the World, more popularly known as the Wobblies.
Shamus Cooke: Hefty splits in the labor movement have already emerged on whether to support Obama’s reelection, based on his complete lack of action on creating jobs combined with his false promises in the 2008 election.
Ann Robertson and Bill Leumer: As a first step, organized labor should organize massive demonstrations in major cities across the country on Labor Day to raise these demands. Working people strongly oppose these cuts and desperately want job-creation programs.
Bill Londrigan: Working mostly behind the scenes in academic, political, and media circles for the past 40-plus years, corporations and the wealthy elite have funded a multipronged strategy to wipe out the history of the integral role played by the American labor movement in the founding and growth of our nation.
David Swanson: How do you get politicians living off legalized bribery to criminalize bribery? How do you persuade the corporate media to report on the interests of flesh-and-blood, non-corporate people?
Diane Lefer: I get it now: When public education works, it’s transformative of the individual and of society. Maybe that’s why it’s under attack.
Caitlin Vega: My mother-in-law is soft-spoken and sweet, but put her on a picket line and she is transformed. To me, that’s what Cesar Chavez stood for, and it’s what our labor movement is all about.
Mario Solis-Marich: Organized labor has never found itself as united as it is at this moment in our country’s history. However the right has never found itself with so much access to funding dedicated to breaking unions.
Tina Dupuy: The several generations of Wisconsinites sauntering around the Capitol in the cold are even more of an apt symbol of what organized labor, pensions, health care and a living wage mean for working people: It’s family. The ability to take care of their families.
Lawrence Wittner: Despite the President’s rhetorical support for nuclear abolition, it looks like the United States and other nations are on a very slow track to ridding the world of the nuclear menace.
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.
Tom Hall: Sure, the Tea Party will win this fall’s election cycle. Yes, they will do every thing they can to disrupt any progressive efforts of the President. But even now, before their election victories have been counted, they are already beginning to war amongst themselves. They are eagerly acting to disprove any belief in the “values” they proclaim. Their hypocrisy will be their undoing.
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 [...]
Class conflict. Political dissent. What it means to be an American. Many people assume these things are incompatible. Throughout America’s history, most U.S. citizens denied the reality of class divisions in their midst, seeing them as either European or somehow related to Soviet communism. And political dissent has not been understood to be central to [...]
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.
Berry Craig: Called the “Ride for Respect,” the demonstration at Walmart corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, will be modeled on civil rights volunteers who rode buses into the South in the 1960s to protest Jim Crow racial injustice.
Charles Hayes: What 42 makes crystal clear is how shallow and superficial the strain of contempt is that enables and sustains racism as prejudice is handed down from one generation to the next.
Walter Moss: What unites us, as it did the early Progressives, is resistance to–in John Muir’s memorable phrase–“trying to make everything dollarable.”
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Labor Must Choose Between Occupy and the Democrats
Shamus Cooke: The labor movement has a foot in both worlds; one in step with the Occupy Movement and the other with the Democrats, who are working to crush Occupy outright.