Negotiations between the Big Three automakers and the United Auto Workers (UAW) were anything but predictable this year. Nationwide strikes at both General Motors and Chrysler, givebacks on an unprecedented scale, and the stirrings of a strong “vote no” opposition inside the union rocked the old auto pattern agreement playbook. . . .

Leading a strike that one hospital administrator said cost her $1 million a day, 5,000 registered nurses at 10 Northern California hospitals in the Sutter Health chain walked off their jobs for two days in mid-October. Five facilities locked out striking nurses for an additional one to three days when the strike, the largest among nurses in a decade, was over. Represented by the California Nurses Association. . .

Tobacco kills in many ways. Long before that first puff lies yet more lethality, hidden in the fields where the tobacco leaf is grown. Last year alone, heat stroke claimed nine North Carolina field workers. A new force is joining tobacco pickers as they go about their dangerous, backbreaking work, one that promises to organize the workers to change those conditions. . . .

In 1978, then United Auto Workers (UAW) President Douglas Fraser, frustrated with corporate America's new aggressiveness, accused employers of waging a "one-sided class war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society." In response, he warned, "we in the UAW intend to reforge the links with those who believe in struggle: the kind of people who sat-down in the factories in the 1930s and who marched in Selma in the 1960s." . . . .

If you happen to be scanning the radio dial near two unique towns in the United States, you could stumble across something unusual: FM radio run by and for farmworkers. In Woodburn, Oregon and south central Florida, farmworkers have added low-power community radio to their organizing arsenal. . . .

If you happen to be scanning the radio dial near two unique towns in the United States, you could stumble across something unusual: FM radio run by and for farmworkers. In Woodburn, Oregon and south central Florida, farmworkers have added low-power community radio to their organizing arsenal.

To set up their radio stations, the two organizations—Oregon’s Northwest Treeplanters and Farmworkers United (PCUN) and Florida’s Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW)—called on Prometheus Radio Project.

The non-profit helps low-wage communities set up radio stations and learn the technical aspects of keeping a radio station alive. Called “low-power” radio because the signal does not travel as far as commercial outlets, the stations target the communities they serve, with a range of five to seven miles.

Despite labor protection in the Central American Free Trade Agreement, violence against Guatemalan unionists continues to escalate. Guatemalan union leader Marco Tulio Ramirez Portela was murdered September 23 outside his home. Ramirez was the secretary of sport and culture for SITRABI, a banana workers union that is organizing workers at Del Monte.

Ramirez’s slaying is the latest in a flurry of violence against unionists in Guatemala that includes the murder in January of port workers’ union leader Pedro Zamora.

SITRABI met with the Ministry of Defense in mid-September to complain about intimidation from the Guatemalan army, which forcibly entered the union’s headquarters in July in a search for information on union members. After the army intervened against a planned SITRABI strike in 1999, the relationship between the union and army has been fractious.

Colombia remains the most dangerous place in the world to organize a union. In a country that witnessed nearly 1,200 murders of trade unionists between 1994 and 2006, only 14 of the crimes have led to convictions. The intensity of anti-union violence has flared up again in recent weeks.

Leaders of the National Union of Food Industry Workers (SINALTRAINAL) have been actively organizing against the labor practices of multinational companies in the country, and face death threats, abductions and torture.

A death threat was found on September 20 at the home of regional union leader Jose Domingo Flores in the city of Bucaramanga. The message was signed by the Aguilas Negras, a government-funded paramilitary group notorious for repressing union movements labeled “subversive” by President Alvaro Uribe’s administration.