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President Obama and the troubled car companies are raising the frightening prospect of mass layoffs and plant closings. Bankruptcy, unless we rewrite it, is a one-way ticket to disposable jobs in a hollowed-out Midwest. If they're too big to fail, too poorly run to put right, it’s time to take...
Author(s): Carol Lambiase
As town leaders in Wallingford, Connecticut, grudgingly lined up to approve health care benefits for the school district’s paraprofessionals, they complained they felt browbeaten into taking their toughest vote ever.
The months-long tug of war within UNITE HERE continued in March as UNITE leaders seceded from the union, embraced a partnership with SEIU, and signaled they would form a new union to compete for members in HERE’s hotel and gaming jurisdictions—while snatching as many members as possible on the...
Billionaire fraudster Bernie Madoff may be behind bars, but his business model is alive and well. How can we keep high-flying bankers from pulling the same kind of bait-and-switch with taxpayers? Experts — from Nobel Prize-winning economists to Alan Greenspan, the libertarian former Federal...
Just as worker centers are reporting an increase in calls and drop-ins, and ripe potential among members, some are facing funding shortfalls that jeopardize their work. . . .
The future of health care unions came into focus in March, with three major nurse unions combining, and bitter rivals SEIU and California nurses announcing a truce. But other state nurse groups decided to throw their own party . . . .
With the two economies firmly interlocked, the United States’ biggest export to Mexico nowadays is economic meltdown. Mexico’s largest sources of revenue are oil sales, factory exports, remittances, and tourism. All are hit hard by the crisis north of the border. . . .
Because they're too impressed with technological fixes. Tacking these fixes onto failed organizational structures can just make those structures worse. And keeping the workforce out of technology decision-making ignores both workers’ needs and knowledge as well as their understanding of the...
Teachers in Puerto Rico defied a strike ban and embarked on an all-out fight for the life of their union in late February one year ago. The 10-day walk-out set in motion months of turmoil for the 40,000-member Federacion de Maestros de Puerto Rico. The government decertified the FMPR as...
Bailed-out banks are driving down tech workers’ wages and stoking anti-immigrant hostilities by replacing entire departments of local techies with foreign-born workers on visas—all while laying off tens of thousands of workers. . . .
Washington is making plans to send GM through bankruptcy's wringer, and the U.S. government seems focused only on restoring GM's bottom line. Labor Notes' Mark Brenner discussed what a more comprehensive solution to the auto makers’ problems would look like on David Bacon’s “The Morning Show”...
Majority sign-up ("card check") would have sped the UFCW's 15-year organizing drive at Smithfield. But they won without it--in an election run under even better rules than EFCA would provide. . . .
Nobody wants to say it on the record, but the buzz is we won’t get the Employee Free Choice Act in its current form. It’s possible to admire labor’s efforts for two million petition signatures for EFCA and still ask, if this is the fight of a lifetime, why aren’t we acting like it? Could the...
As Big 3 automakers rolled out plans that would “save” the industry by destroying jobs, it’s easy to forget that union members must vote on changes to their contract. . . .
The United Auto Workers and Ford reached a tentative agreement February 24 on concessions. The Obama administration had demanded concessions from workers at GM and Chrysler as part of a “viability plan” the companies must present in exchange for government bailout loans, but the UAW negotiated...
