Troublemakers Blog
July 22, 2010 /
The recession has hammered transit agencies across the country. Some 700 New York City transit workers—mostly bus operators and station agents—have been laid off since May and another 200–300 may be gone by the end of the summer.
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July 21, 2010 / Tiffany Ten Eyck
Twenty-two undocumented students risked deportation at the nation’s Capitol yesterday, staging sit-ins in the offices of five senators. After leaving the offices the group unfurled a banner in the Senate building—considered a felony—and held a second sit-in in the atrium. All were arrested by the time the building closed in the evening.
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July 20, 2010 / Mischa Gaus
Dockers in Montreal were locked out Monday in a dispute over income security for new workers. Longshore workers with the Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 375 have refused to work overtime since July 9, telling their employer to call in more help before assigning OT.
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July 15, 2010 / Jane Slaughter
Less than 6 percent of Ascension Health’s 110,000 workers are union members, but apparently that’s 6 percent too many for the country’s largest Catholic health system. Management is on a concerted campaign to bust unions at its hospitals in Michigan, say the Teamsters, the Michigan Nurses Association, and their ally Interfaith Worker Justice, a national »
July 13, 2010 /
I can’t help but think that the folks behind the “America Speaks” town hall meetings, held June 26 in 19 cities across the country, were shell-shocked by the results. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and, principally, the foundation of Wall Street financier »
July 07, 2010 /
A tentative agreement has been announced in one of the longest-running and bitter strikes in North America, among the 3,500 nickel and copper miners and mill workers of Steelworkers Locals 6500 and 6200 in Ontario. The Steelworkers union and mine operator Vale Inco are withholding details until ratification votes today and tomorrow conclude. How has a year on »
July 02, 2010 /
The U.S. Supreme Court in mid-June knocked down 600 decisions by the National Labor Relations Board on the grounds that only two NLRB members lacked the authority needed to issue binding decisions. While pulling the rug out from under 600 decisions may seem cataclysmic, the bigger risk is that Senate Republicans now have a roadmap to hamstring the agency they " »
July 01, 2010 / Steve Early
In the last five years, the Service Employees (SEIU) has gone from being a media darling to generating more bad press for itself than any other labor organization. To bolster its fading progressive brand, SEIU has produced a slick $25 dollar coffee table book called Stronger Together: The Story of SEIU. It's a whirlwind of self-congratulatory and »
June 30, 2010 /
Labor Notes had a presence at the U.S. Social Forum last week, the gathering in Detroit of 15,000 activists from every different social justice movement you can think of. There was a workshop for every cause and strategy, from stopping “fracking” to »
June 29, 2010 /
The National Union of Healthcare Workers is filing for an election today for 43,000 workers at the Kaiser Permanente health care system in California to decertify the Service Employees union (SEIU). A recently published book, Labor’s Civil War in California by Cal Winslow, »