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By January 2020 I was feeling disenchanted with my union. As proud as I was of my colleagues and fellow members, I believed that we had a top-down organization.
I knew we could do better but I didn’t know how to begin.
Unionized faculty and staff at the Vermont state colleges are in a fight to defend their jobs and schools, which teach working class students mainly from rural parts of the state.
This is an excerpt from the forthcoming revised and expanded 50th anniversary edition of Strike! by Jeremy Brecher, PM Press, June 2020.
This is a time of deep uncertainty. The coronavirus has been the leading cause of death in the United States since April 7, but scientist and doctors are only just beginning to understand it.
In a cataclysmic health crisis, it’s plain to see how essential the work of journalists has become. The public is turning to news media sources in record numbers, particularly online, to answer burning questions:
On a pitch-dark night on February 28, striking janitors led a huge march along the frozen streets of downtown Minneapolis. Any other night, the janitors would be warm inside, cleaning the buildings of the Fortune 500.
In United Teachers Los Angeles, our 34,000-member union, we used Contract Action Teams (CAT) in every school to build up to our winning strike in January 2019.
My first teaching assignment was in a special education classroom in an elementary school basement; above the door in red were the words “Shelter Inside.”
For most nurses and other health care workers it's been the most traumatic month of our careers. We knew we were going into this world-historic challenge with a crippled, fractured, understaffed, and under-capacity health care system.
UPDATE: On May 1 graduate employees won free summer 2020 housing in the dorms for all international students who need it. The union continued to pressure the university administration after winning its MOU earlier.
Unions at the three hospitals on the University of Washington campus asked management for protective Plexiglas barriers similar to what we are seeing at grocery stores. When management said no, we built them ourselves.
Libraries are one of the last social services to normally be open to all. Our labor affects the community health in many ways.
More than 50 health care workers and supporters held a socially distanced rally in front of Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center on April 15 as part of a national day of action for healthcare workers.
Unions and bosses have different outlooks on safety. Employers say illnesses and injuries are caused by worker carelessness: he didn’t wash his hands enough; she touched her face. That’s the way the boss wants you to think, too.
Workers injured or killed by their jobs are honored every year on April 28, Workers’ Memorial Day.
