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As a state employee, a human service caseworker, I've gotten educated about Illinois's budget woes out of necessity. My job is to determine eligibility and serve people who are poor, disabled, or elderly and rely on state services--Medicaid and food stamps. More of us are in need of these...

I was a student and aspiring labor journalist when I volunteered for picket duty with the locked-out workers from A.E. Staley Co., the giant corn processing plant in Decatur, Illinois. By then, 1994, the lockout was already months old and much of the action was taking place far away from the...

Just because a job’s green doesn’t mean it’s good. With everything going green—if it really is—what does that mean for our workplaces? A union-backed report by Good Jobs First cautioned that job creation in the new “green economy” often means more low-wage, low-benefit work with companies...

We’ve gone from democracy to hypocrisy in California. Prior to February at Kaiser Santa Clara Medical Center we had labor unity. The 2,400-plus members understood the importance of union solidarity. All shop stewards were elected by the rank and file. Since that time, when our local, United...

Janitors in California’s SEIU Local 1877 are fighting tech giant Cisco Systems’ mass layoffs. Since February, the Cisco’s janitorial services contractor, American Building Management, has laid off 75 janitors, more than 40 percent of its workforce.

Most of the workers are low-income...

In an interview, longtime immigrant rights activist David Bacon says labor's new joint position on immigration is inconsistent—and too friendly to employers. It wasn’t always like this. What happened?