Troublemakers Blog
June 22, 2010 / Jane Slaughter
GM workers in Saginaw, Michigan, voted down drastic concessions by a big margin June 17. It was the second time in three months that GM workers already working at substandard pay refused to be chopped any further.
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June 21, 2010 /
Bay Area dockworkers refused to cross a picket line early Sunday, leaving a ship loaded with cargo from Israel floating offshore.
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June 18, 2010 / Jane Slaughter
As the U.S. Social Forum approaches, here in Detroit, we at Labor Notes have been talking a lot about how unions can work with other movements to pursue common goals. In Brazil last week, I was lucky to meet activists who had a terrific example: a metalworkers union that helped organize a movement of poor people to take over vacant land and build houses for »
June 16, 2010 /
Day 20 on the picket line. The rain has stopped and finally all of our union brothers and sisters have warmed up in the sun. Most of us on the picket line have never been through anything like this strike. Fear is a factor out here because Dr Pepper Snapple Group, which owns Mott’s, has played on our worst fears: the loss of everything we have worked so hard »
June 15, 2010 / Dan La Botz
Grupo Mexico, the largest mining company in Mexico, has imposed a company union on workers at its Cananea copper mine in Sonora in northern Mexico. This comes just days after the Mexican government used helicopters, tear gas, and thousands of police to »
June 14, 2010 / Paul Abowd
The Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) won Friday's election to lead the Chicago Teachers Union. The CTU's new President Karen Lewis garnered 60 percent of the vote against an incumbent whose caucus has controlled the third largest Teachers (AFT) local in the country for 37 of the last 40 years.
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June 09, 2010 / Jane Slaughter
International union connections are a kick. Within a few hours of my arrival at a union convention in Brazil, I met a copper miner from Chile whose company wants wage cuts, a union doctor from Spain fighting the imposition of co-pays, a Nestle worker from Colombia, and railroad workers from Japan.
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June 07, 2010 / Dan La Botz
As many as 2,000 Mexican Federal Police and Sonora State Police, supported by helicopters, invaded the Cananea copper mine Sunday night around 10 p.m., firing tear gas and attacking and beating miners who were defending the mine, according to news reports.
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June 02, 2010 /
“Our parents have suffered from this cheap labor market and now they are getting old. Do we want to follow in the footstep of our parents?” asks an anonymous Honda worker in China in an internet posting explaining the motivations behind a stunning two-week strike that shut down Honda’s production across the country.
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June 02, 2010 / Tiffany Ten Eyck
Apple's been all over the news these days, and not just because of the iPad. The high number of worker suicides at a supplier factory in Shenzhen, China, has built into a crisis for Apple, one that activists could push to crack the abusive relationship between corporations and their suppliers that drives wages and working conditions ever downward across the »