Troublemakers Blog

April 26, 2012 /
Communications Workers at AT&T are back in bargaining just 18 months after the last group of workers settled a contract. Once again the company is proving to be difficult to deal with, spurring the union to forge unity across regions and between AT&T and Verizon workers. »
April 20, 2012 /
Organizing the union at the Smithfield Foods plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, was a bruising 16-year battle, the fight brought together African American, white, and Mexican immigrant workers, who were able to find common ground despite the company’s attempts to use racial division and immigration enforcement to try to defeat them. »
April 18, 2012 /
The blockheads we curse daily on the factory floor are transformed by Gregg Shotwell's “large-caliber pen” into a bureaucracy “organized like a totem pole—one empty wooden head on top of another.” Such gems are found on every page of this selection of Shotwell’s Live Bait & Ammo shop floor papers. »
April 12, 2012 /
A campus organizing drive in Philadelphia once again raised a question that’s bedeviled workers seeking power against their bosses: Should they go with a smaller union where they know they’ll have a voice, or choose a big one with potentially more clout but less say for the rank and file? »
April 11, 2012 /
A Brazilian General Motors worker, Teodoro Antonio Pereira, was killed in late March while moving a die. Pereira was working Saturday overtime and working alone on a two-person job. To protest his death, on the next work day his co-workers shut down production for two hours for an in-plant meeting. »
March 30, 2012 /
Harvard has 73 libraries that comprise the largest private library collection in the world, the keystone supporting billions of dollars in research grants awarded to the Harvard community each year. Yet the Harvard administration feels its libraries are a drag on finances and is again threatening layoffs. »
March 28, 2012 /
Three books on the Wisconsin rebellion help us to better understand the 2011 uprising that brought hundreds of thousands into the streets. They also provoke some rethinking of the strategies involved. »
March 27, 2012 / Mark Brenner
The tax compromise made by the California Federation of Teachers resulted in major improvements to the ballot initiative that could be in front of voters in November. But there are compelling reasons why proponents of the millionaires tax should have bucked the governor's deal and continued their struggle to reverse endless austerity. »
March 23, 2012 / Steve Early
From "Jersey Shore" to the short-lived "All-American Muslim" to the glitzier "Shahs of Sunset," there seems to be no ethnic community left untouched by the national carny show known as reality TV. Always dissed or ignored by the mass media, the multi-ethnic enclave of organized labor might have been the last holdout against letting it all hang out in this »
March 21, 2012 /
I’m an elementary school teacher with a crummy evaluation. It’s a testament to the families at my school that I didn't spend my February vacation responding to angry or terrified emails from my students’ parents. »

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