Troublemakers Blog
March 03, 2010 /
It is true what they say: no words or photos can describe the enormity of what we saw in Haiti. Nine of us nurses, eight from Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, just spent 10 days here volunteering at the public hospital in Port au Prince, working the night shifts.
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March 01, 2010 /
The student-worker movement that’s emerged in California over the past five months is gearing up for a strike and day of action. On March 4 students all over the state will strike, march, and occupy buildings to keep education accessible to all—and ensure sustainable jobs for those working in education.
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February 26, 2010 / Tiffany Ten Eyck
Get ready for a really big show—the 2010 Labor Notes Conference is on track to be the biggest ever! It’s got to be a sign that more and more people are fed up with strategies that don’t work. Come find out what it feels like to be together with more than 1,000 other troublemakers who are searching, like you, for a way to light some fires.
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February 25, 2010 /
Book Review: Healing Together: The Labor-Management Partnership at Kaiser Permanente, by Tom Kochan, Robert McKersie, Adrienne Eaton, and Paul Adler (Cornell ILR Press, 2009)
Most labor relations academics are unabashedly anti-union, reflecting the influence of business and the decline of organized labor. The authors of Healing Together are pro- »
February 24, 2010 / Paul Abowd
Charter school companies in Los Angeles were licking their chops last summer when the school board gave outside managers a chance to operate 36 schools next year. After yesterday’s packed board meeting where officials voted to award »
February 24, 2010 /
Contract lecturers at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti are fighting a hostile administration over the right for part-time adjunct lecturers to join the lecturers' union. They're part of one-third of teachers not on the tenure track nationally who've been on the job at least five years but are treated like short-term employees just seeking "a little »
February 22, 2010 /
The “reinvention” of the “New GM” has begun with the opening of a lithium-ion battery plant in Brownstown, Michigan, near Detroit. The event was remarkable not only because the Brownstown plant signals GM’s return to the production of an electric vehicle but also because, for the first time in about 30 years, GM has opened a non-union plant in the U.S.
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February 19, 2010 /
The mantra is jobs, and the government has unlocked the public coffers to subsidize employers that are hiring. But what kind of jobs are they creating with our tax dollars? In New York, the Teamsters are putting the heat on employers only too happy to pocket public money while creating lousy jobs and fighting unions.
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February 18, 2010 /
Book Review: Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Working Women Organizing for Equality in New York City, by Jane LaTour. As a journeyman electrician in Portland, Oregon, I hadn’t thought of my choice to enter the trades as a political act. It was eye-opening to learn from Jane LaTour’s book that for some of the pioneers this was their aim.
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February 16, 2010 /
A Labor Notes fundraising party in the Bay Area on Superbowl Sunday raised more than $1,500 to send young activists to the Labor Notes Conference April 23-25 in Detroit. At the “Superbowl/Anti-Superbowl” party, guests divided into separate spaces to watch the game or to ignore it. We asked for a donation of $20, or »