Blowing a Whistle on Negative Campaigning

Although I am nobody’s referee, I know a foul when I see one. Some time ago I called one on national SEIU’s disruption of the Labor Notes Conference. Now I’ve detected another one in one piece of UHW’s negative campaign against Andy Stern.
The violation consists of imbalanced and tendentious criticism of an agreement between SEIU [...]

Flowers for Mom,Yes! Colombia Free Trade Agreement, No!

If you bought your Mom flowers for Mothers Day, chances are that they arrived on one of the 28 daily cargo flights into Miami from Colombia, where over 100,000 mainly female workers pick and process flowers for the U.S. market. They earn a minimal wage, are exposed to numerous toxins from pesticides and fungicides, [...]

Splits in the Labor Movement, Then and Now: C.I.O. - Change to Win

Rough economic times, changing demographics, the reinvention of work and workplaces, conflicting models for moving forward - both in the 1930s and the 2000s one result has been to split the labor movement.
AFL vs. CIO — AFL-CIO vs. Change to Win, how far do the parallels hold up?

Labor scholars, writers, Challenge SEIU

In May Day Letter To SEIU President Andy Stern, 100 Scholars, Artists and Writers Defend Right to “Principled Dissent” and Caution Against UHW Trusteeship
“We are writing to express our deep concern about SEIU’s threatened trusteeship over its third largest local, United Healthcare Workers (UHW). We believe that there must always be room within organized labor [...]

Harold Meyerson on why the Democrats need unions

In his latest op-ed, the astute Harold Meyerson gives some advice to the Democrats about attracting white working class voters. The key is union. In the electoral long run, the Employee Free Choice Act and, this November, labor’s secret weapon–Working America.

Barbara Ehrenreich with the truckers

Barbara Ehrenreich has been arguing that the left and the Democratic Party ought to be paying attention to the travails and protests of the truckers. She blogged today about the protest in DC.
Three truckers – two white and one black – speak about their dwindling livelihoods and the need for immediate government action to [...]

ARAMARK Cafeteria Workers To March through Midtown to Highlight Unfair Two-Tier Economy

Struggling to make ends meet while working in the wealthiest corporate headquarters…
Concerned about the effect of corporate giant ARAMARK’s business practices in New York and in communities across the nation, non-union ARAMARK workers at PricewaterhouseCoopers and Citigroup cafeterias will be joined on April 22 by striking ARAMARK workers from Bank of New York and CBS [...]

A Personal Reflection on the Labor Notes Conference

by Paul Garver
Elsewhere on this page you will find a collective statement by the editors of TalkingUnion on the disruption at the recent Labor Notes Conference. But as a conference participant and contributor to that statement, I want to put it in perspective. For me, as for most of the thousand activists who were at [...]

Workers In a Global Economy: Must They be Left Behind?

Demos has organized a interesting program on the global economy.
Thurs., April 17, 2008
Program from 12:00-2:00 pm
at Demos 220 Fifth Ave., 5th Floor
New York, NY [ directions]
NAFTA, CAFTA, the Columbia Free Trade Agreement, climate change and issues of the global economy are front and center in our Presidential debate. The laissez faire vision of the global [...]

Four unions announce Strategic Alliance

In late March, three major AFL-CIO unions (Communication Workers, Steel Workers, and Autoworkers) plus the IFTPE announced what they termed a “strategic alliance.” We regard the creation of such an alliance as a positive and significant step. It doesn’t seem to be the first move in a grandiose, but never realized, mega-merger scheme. Nor does [...]