All Articles

Each year around budget time, Californians hear a familiar story from Sacramento: There’s another stalemate, because state law caps property tax rates and requires two-thirds of legislators to approve tax hikes.

Outsized buttons proclaimed it “history in the making.” Indeed, nothing like it has been seen in the United States for decades. Over 1,500 union members gathered in Cleveland June 6-9 to found a labor party. A groundswell of interest in the last two months doubled the turn-out convention...

What are the banks doing with our bailout billions? In a small factory in western Illinois, Wells Fargo has become a huge roadblock to economic recovery. Several hundred angry people shared their frustration with the bank, marching in the pouring rain June 11 at its Chicago offices.

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...