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By Susan Zakin (Author), Bill McKibben (Author), Chris Jordan (Photographer)
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mn.gov
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Like most states, Minnesota has a big budget problem. But unlike most states, it’s looking to the well-heeled to help fill the gap. Gov. Mark Dayton plans to attack the state’s $6.2 billion deficit by raising taxes on the rich.
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By David Sirota — Decisions by bought-off elected officials highlight a larger corporatist ideology—one that says attracting the best and brightest to the “greed is good” financial industry is more important than attracting that work force to common-good endeavors.
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By Joe Conason — Even in its terribly weakened condition, the labor movement remains a bulwark against the kind of corporate tyranny that would swiftly make serfs of the rest of us.
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By Amy Goodman — As many as 80,000 people marched to the Wisconsin state Capitol in Madison on Saturday as part of an ongoing protest against newly elected Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to not just badger the state’s public employee unions, but to break them.
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By Eugene Robinson — Let’s be clear: The high-stakes standoff in Wisconsin has nothing to do with balancing the state’s budget.
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Flickr / mrlange
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Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on Saturday rejected a compromise on a budget repair bill under which Democrats offered to accept cuts in health and pension benefits for public employees in exchange for retaining their right to bargain collectively.
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While Wall Streeters continue to rake it in, there’s a movement afoot to redirect the public’s rage against the humble public employee. These hardworking folks don’t look like the greedy opportunists they’ve been smeared as.
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By William Pfaff — It is not pension claims that are driving the current political uproar. It is popular fury at the people who created the present economic crisis and have been rewarded, with everyone else left to face the consequences.
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Flickr / Moto@Club4AG
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Shareholders of Continental and United Airlines have finally voted to form a more perfect United Airlines, merging the two companies under United’s name to create the world’s largest airline service, overtaking its closest U.S. rival—the newly merged Delta and Northwest Airlines—and European carriers.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Remembering the labor movement’s heroic battles is bittersweet on a Labor Day when so many Americans are unemployed, when wages are stagnant or dropping, and when the labor movement itself is in stark decline.
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boc.ca.gov
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California’s outdated technical infrastructure has made 200,000 state employees very, very happy. After an injunction by the governor to cut workers pay to the state’s $7.25 minimum wage, the state controller has successfully argued that such pay docking would be impossible given the state’s outdated payroll computer system.
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By Ruth Marcus — Rich Trumka—the AFL-CIO president intercepts any attempted honorific with an easy “Call me Rich”—comes armed with charts. His first one is, literally, in shades of gray. Its message is anything but.
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senate.gov
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Although she was trailing primary challenger Bill Halter in at least one recent poll, Arkansas Democrats decided Tuesday to give Sen. Blanche Lincoln another shot. Lincoln had been targeted by unions and progressive groups after she killed the pro-labor bill she once co-sponsored and worked to weaken health care reform.
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Flickr / Kai Henry (CC-BY)
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By Moshe Adler — The theories on which we base wages are highly flawed—and so is your paycheck.
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Flickr / AFL-CIO (CC-BY)
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Sen. Blanche Lincoln helped sink the proposed Employee Free Choice Act, which would have made labor organizing much easier. Now the Democrat is headed to a primary runoff against Arkansas Lt. Gov. Bill Halter (above), thanks in part to a massive multimillion-dollar campaign effort by the AFL-CIO and the SEIU ... (continued)
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Wikipedia is big news in college, Texas textbooks go the way of toilet paper and the NPR strike we never saw coming.
Posted on Mar 17, 2010
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lincoln.senate.gov
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One of the Senate’s most conservative Democrats now faces a primary challenge on her left flank. Blanche Lincoln, who betrayed the unions that had supported her and who had bitterly fought off a public option in health care reform, was already headed for a tough race. (continued)
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AP / J. Scott Applewhite
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The ridiculous Supreme Court decision to let corporations spend whatever they want on behalf of political candidates just got more ridiculous: Lawyers say that under the ruling there’s a loophole that would allow companies to do so anonymously.
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AP / Elise Amendola
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By Chris Hedges — Now that unions have been broken, rapacious corporations like FedEx and toadies in Congress and the White House are turning workers into serfs.
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AP / Charles Rex Arbogast
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By Peter Z. Scheer — The other “peace candidate” in the 2008 Democratic primary isn’t thrilled with the president’s order to radically escalate the war in Afghanistan, no matter if there’s an exit strategy: “What are we going to learn in 18 months that we haven’t already learned in the last eight years?”
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AP / Charles Rex Arbogast
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The other “peace candidate” in the 2008 Democratic primary isn’t thrilled with the president’s order to radically escalate the war in Afghanistan, no matter if there’s an exit strategy: “What are we going to learn in 18 months that we haven’t already learned in the last eight years?”
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By Marie Cocco — We are warned it is dangerously protectionist to enforce existing trade laws against China’s cheap tire surge, but Obama is obligated to do so—and for good reason.
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By David Sirota — Washington’s labor, environmental, anti-war and anti-poverty groups spent millions electing a Democratic president and Congress and were promptly stabbed in the back. So why are they still loyal?
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Facebook / Boycott Whole Foods
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Turns out comparing unions to herpes and raving against health care reform in The Wall Street Journal isn’t great for business, at least when your business sells granola to progressives, hippies and other Truthdig readers. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey’s efforts have earned him a boycott. Guess we’ll just have to get our gluten-free almond cookies elsewhere.
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telegraph.co.uk
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Strikebreakers have come a long way from their origins as goons with billy clubs. In South Korea, police commandos dropped from helicopters to try to end a car factory sit-in in Pyeongtaek, where laid-off employees have occupied their former workplace and are demanding their jobs back.
Posted on Aug 5, 2009
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Collage from Flickr / Korean Resource Center and senate.gov
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It was a foregone conclusion that Republicans and big business would fight tooth and nail against the proposed Employee Free Choice Act, the union bill that would make organizing easier, but in the end it was Democrats who killed it. The Socialist Worker, appropriately enough, has the most comprehensive take on the story to date.
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Flickr / aflcio2008
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Senate Democrats aren’t doing their friends in organized labor any favors. Lawmakers have decided to strip out the basic reform in the proposed Employee Free Choice Act that would make creating unions much easier—the whole point of the bill. But all may not be lost. ...
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It’s the Bob and Matt Show! Robert Scheer and Matt Miller discuss the prospects of a public health care system now that the Democrats hold a 60-vote majority in the Senate, and then they move on to examine the impact of unions on education and health care. Tune in to hear Friday’s special summer show of “Left, Right & Center.”
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Flickr / Dr. Keats
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The Treasury Department has cut a deal with the United Auto Workers to send Chrysler into bankruptcy while protecting retiree benefits, The New York Times reports. Fiat would be in a more favorable position to take a cut of the company once it’s in bankruptcy. Chrysler’s equity stakeholders are shaping up as the big losers in all of this.
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By Marie Cocco — The AFL-CIO spent $250 million in last year’s elections on behalf of Obama and other Democrats, yet a waffling president and a handful of senators have managed to kill the proposed Employee Free Choice Act, a cruel defeat for labor.
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Wikimedia Commons / John Regas
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Sen. Arlen Specter gave the proposed Employee Free Choice Act the shaft Tuesday, severely wounding legislation that would make forming unions significantly easier. Labor leaders were depending on support from moderates such as Specter, but, facing a primary challenge, the Pennsylvania Republican chickened out.
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By Marie Cocco — No Wall Street rally can obscure the scary historical prospect that most Americans now working can expect to have less income security in retirement than their parents had.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — It makes sense to prop up ailing carmakers. Allowing GM and Chrysler to go bankrupt could be a triggering event that might make a very bad economy much worse.
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By Eugene Robinson — Unbeknown to the House Republicans who voted unanimously against President Obama’s stimulus package, we are in the midst of a rare fundamental shift in American politics.
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AP file photo / Reed Saxon
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By Mike Farrell — The Hollywood-centric “Membership First” faction that has controlled the Screen Actors Guild’s national board for most of the last five years chooses tactics—misinformation, tough talk and over-promising—that undermine the union’s credibility.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Because Arne Duncan gets along with teachers unions but is also seen as a reformer, his selection was interpreted as a politically shrewd, split-the-difference choice by Obama. But that is not the whole story.
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By Eugene Robinson — Despite the popular myth, lemmings don’t really hurl themselves off a cliff to reduce their numbers. That sort of behavior is seen only among Republicans in the Senate, who gave us a demonstration when they torpedoed legislation to bail out the auto industry.
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telegraph.co.uk
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In a move that further complicates the anti-government unrest rocking Greece for the past four days, the country’s two biggest trade unions have declared their intention to go ahead with a planned 24-hour strike, likely to paralyze the economy in protest against government policies and incompetent handling of the economic crisis.
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By Marie Cocco — As Congress and the White House lurch toward possible approval of a loan package for the crippled auto industry, we are undoubtedly in store for more union-bashing.
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Flickr / SteelCityHobbies
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The auto industry bailout would have no chance of passing without the muscle of the Big Three’s unionized work force. Yet you can’t turn around without hearing someone trash autoworkers for the terrible crime of trying to earn a decent living.
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my.barackobama.com
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Not only is Barack Obama packing his inner circle with neo-liberal Clinton stalwarts, he’s also avoiding the question of labor by not including any representative of workers in the economic policy team he announced Monday. What gives?
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A lobbying powerhouse with an emphatically pro-Republican political action committee is pounding Democratic Senate candidates for supporting legislation that would make it easier for workers to unionize. The ads portray Al Franken in Minnesota and Tom Allen of Maine as backing Big Brother-style surveillance of American workers.
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npr.org
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The nation’s most powerful labor unions are ratcheting up their efforts to elect Barack Obama with massive voter outreach campaigns. Both SEIU and the AFL-CIO have said this year’s efforts will be their largest voter mobilization campaigns ever.
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By David Sirota — In the imminent confrontation over the Employee Free Choice Act, an almost embarrassingly modest proposal, corporations are actually billing themselves as the underdog—the poor, overmatched peasant David against the Philistine monster Goliath.
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Jared C. Benedict / Wikimedia Commons
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Labor groups have filed election complaints against Wal-Mart for reportedly telling store managers that Democrats’ proposed labor law changes would drive down wages and force layoffs.
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By David Sirota — History books teem with six-word phrases, from the comforting (“Nothing to fear but fear itself”) to the inspiring (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”) to the embarrassing (“Read my lips, no new taxes”). But the six words “on the basis of union membership” could be more momentous than any of those.
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AP photo / Monica Matiauda
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Former Roman Catholic Bishop Fernando Lugo’s campaign against poverty has won him the presidency of Paraguay, a country that has been ruled by the same conservative party for 61 years—arguably longer than the run of any party in any other country.
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By David Sirota — The state in which an infamous slaughter of labor organizers occurred in 1914 may not be killing unionists these days but its persecution of them continues.
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By David Sirota — A straight line can be drawn between the 1914 labor massacre in Colorado and today’s killing fields in Colombia. And one of the villains in both cases is the U.S. government.
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By David Sirota — In 1958, the GOP took a shellacking after the vice president used an anti-worker scheme in trying to win votes for his party. Now, right-wingers are resurrecting that failed strategy in Colorado, a key “swing” state.
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