Working Life

The always-helpful Lane Windham sent along a comparison prepared by the AFL-CIO that examines the difference between the AFL-CIO Officers proposals versus the insurgents proposals. I’ve provided it here for people to peruse and appreciate Lane’s response to my request. You can also compare the AFL-CIO officers comparison to a comparison put out by the […]

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Honest, really, I’ll be posting this morning…it’s just that I got back at 2 a.m. from the West Coast so it may take a few more hours to get something up, er, that is, a post. In my hot hands, having greeted me on the fax machine, is a pretty interesting letter from UFCW president […]

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I came out to sunny Los Angeles to take part in a one-day conference on Wal-Mart put on by the UCLA Labor Center (more on that in a future post). But, while I’ve been out here, there’s been a very interesting behind-the-scenes maneuvering at the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. The apparent end result […]

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Okay, if you want to read the entire deal, word for word, just click here for a Word document, which was just passed to me late yesterday. It’s basically as I reported on Monday. Apparently, the Federation’s management took a hard line that, in order to take advantage of the incentive package, people had to […]

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One of my pen pals is Michael Murphy, the Washington State treasurer. Mike is currently serving in his third four-year term and has thirty-three years in public treasury management at both the state and local level. He just dropped me this line about a revealing meeting he had with one of the leading privatizers of […]

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After a lot of tension, the Newspaper Guild, which represents the AFL-CIO’s professional staff, has made a deal with the Federation for an incentive package to “encourage” people to leave the AFL-CIO before the announced cuts become official. I guess the more people who leave before the layoffs go into effect in the Fall, the […]

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On the road here in Los Angeles, giving a little rap Saturday at a conference of about 500 people on what else? Wal-Mart. The enormous wealth of the Walton family, and good ‘ole Alice Walton’s purchase of a $35 million painting, versus the poverty of the company’s workers truly blows people away. And, lo and […]

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Off of yesterday’s post on John Sweeney’s letter re: affiliation with Central Labor Bodies by non-AFL-CIO unions, a couple of people in the know mused whether SEIU’s pull-out from the Federation would be treated like the Carpenters or not. One perspective: “You missed one critical phrase in the letter,” wrote one labor insider. He pointed […]

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This just landed in my e-mail box from Norma Rae (hey,this is labor, no Deep Throats here…and that’s so ’70s anyway). Below is a letter from John Sweeney to the leadership in the field, basically telling people that local unions that belong to unaffiliated international unions can’t join local labor councils. It’s obvious that this […]

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Checking in with the Beast of Bentonville…it’s shareholder meeting time for the Beast. And a few people are asking the Beast to try to clean up its act. Check out this story from the Wall Street Journal today: Wal-Mart Urged to Review Controls Institutional Holders Press For Study of Its Standards On Regulation and Laws […]

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