"When 5,000 skilled, experienced [health care] workers are put out on the street, will that make the care patients receive better, or worse?” The answer to this question, posed by Chris Allnutt, Secretary-Business Manager of British Columbia’s Hospital Employees Union, seems pretty obvious. Yet BC Premier Gordon Campbell is bent on outsourcing more than 5,000 hospital jobs by June, in what would be the most drastic step yet in his bid to privatize BC’s health care system and, in the words of one of his top aides, “crush” HEU “like a bug.”....

More than 50 Florida farmworkers and their supporters put their health on the line to end sweatshop working conditions in the tomato fields that supply Taco Bell. Outside the fast food giant’s headquarters in Irvine, California, they held a 10-day hunger strike during which three fasters had to be hospitalized. The strike is the latest move in a boycott campaign the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) started over two years ago.......

Since 1996 the leadership of the AFL-CIO, and of a few important unions, have put as many of labor’s eggs as they could in the basket of organizing the unorganized. John Sweeney says labor needs to organize a million workers a year just to tread water, and that growth is our top priority. . . .

Bargaining to organize” is a central goal of many unions-but it doesn’t always work as planned. The CWA (Communications Workers) has had polar opposite experiences with bargaining to organize at two phone industry giants. The differences were related to both the employers’ good faith, or lack thereof, and to our own mobilization efforts. . . .

Thousands of workers at Yale, President crossed the Bush’s alma mater, began a five-day strike on March 3, seeking decent wages, better pensions, training and advancement opportunities, and job security......

The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) are conducting merger talks. At first glance, this is not that surprising, considering that many smaller unions (like the BLE) are amalgamating into larger ones these days. Also, from an industrial union standpoint, this merger is not simply a hodgepodge amalgamation like some of late. A merger between workers in the rail industry and those in the trucking industry in theory does make some sense. These workers are all in freight transportation, after all......

Over 11,000 workers may be downsized in the largest mass layoffs in Italy since the 1950s, as FIAT Auto threatens to close two plants and limit production in another. The largest Italian labor federation, CGIL, claims the firings will spread to include over 50,000 workers in affiliated industries......

Depuis quelques mois une sensation de dynamisme grandissante, quoique inégale, contre une guerre imminente en Irak s'est répandue à travers le mouvement travailliste aux Etats-Unis et dans le monde......