Saurav Sarkar

Erie Locomotive Plant Workers Strike against Two-Tier

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This article has been updated since the original version, first published March 1.

At a sprawling locomotive manufacturing complex a mile long and a mile wide in Erie, Pennsylvania, 1,700 workers struck for nine days and fended off their new employer’s efforts to impose a raft of concessions, including two-tier wages.

Temperatures were below freezing. Strikers stood on a dozen picket lines ringing the plant, feeding wood into burn barrels and making life difficult for any non-union employees who tried to drive through the gates.

Two workers installing solar energy at Garfield County Fairgrounds

A Green New Deal for American Labor?

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The simple yellow protest signs were stenciled “Green Jobs for All.” Speaker after speaker stepped into the middle of the office floor, marked with a U.S. House of Representatives seal. Representative-Elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, fresh off her election win, gave the protesters high fives.

That was the scene in November when the youth climate justice organization Sunrise Movement held a sit-in at the office of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who was soon to be the Speaker of the House.

Most Americans had never heard of the “Green New Deal” at the time.

Federal government employees and their supporters rally on January 10, 2019, in front of a federal building in New York to protest the government shutdown.

Federal Workers: Shutdown and Out

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What would you do if management could force you to work without pay, lock you out with no consequences, and fire you for going on strike?

That’s the situation facing 800,000 federal workers—and their unions—during the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.

Forty percent of the government’s civilian workforce besides postal workers are being deprived of money to pay for rent, gas, groceries, and car and student loan payments.

They include 420,000 workers who are being forced to work without pay and 380,000 who are locked out.

Scenes from the L.A. Teachers Strike

It’s day four of the Los Angeles teachers strike, and the big news is that the district and the union will meet today at noon to resume negotiations for the first time since the strike began. Mayor Eric Garcetti, who has been urging the district to come back to the table, will mediate.

George H.W. Bush: Not So Civil After All

In the thousands of words spilled for the late George H.W. Bush, you won’t find the names of Argentine workers Pedro Troiani and Carlos Propato.

The two union activists were among those detained and tortured in 1976 at a Buenos Aires Ford plant and later at a secret detention facility run by a military dictatorship, a government supported by then-CIA Director Bush.

Days after Bush’s funeral, two elderly former plant executives were sentenced to prison for their role in kidnapping 24 union delegates.