Working Life

Twenty brave souls are going to try to go against the grain today and try to vote in a union at the Beast from Bentonville. What’s interesting about the article below is its mentioning of what happened to the other people who tried to get a union at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart acts like an organized crime […]

Read the full story

Not a good day for Wal-Mart. First, a federal jury hit the Beast with a $7.5 million judgement for discriminating against a disabled employee in Long Island. Too bad for Wal-Mart: unlike the sham deal with the DOL, in which Wal-Mart paid a fine but also claimed it was not admitting any guilt, here it’s […]

Read the full story

So, less than a week out from the showdown, it may not be a showdown after all–at least where the politics are concerned. I hear that John Wilhelm, the president of UNITE-HERE, who was mentioned as a likely challenger to John Sweeney, isn’t going to throw his hat in the ring to challenge—at least not […]

Read the full story

If the economy is supposedly growing, why is job growth still a problem? Which leads me to the related question: if an economy isn’t producing jobs, what good is it? The folks at the Economic Policy Institute put out a report last week that did not get widespread attention. Called “The Lukewarm 2004 Job Market.” […]

Read the full story

Thanks for everyone’s comments. I also received many others via email. Here’s a selection (I’m only using initials assuming that if they wrote to me privately, they might not want their names publicly used since a number of people who wrote hold down senior labor positions): DS wrote: Have you been watching the International Unions, […]

Read the full story

So, I’m curious to hear from people who have read my L.A. Times piece, what do you think about labor’s electoral strategy? Should we continue as we have before? Take a radical new path? Something in between? Comments welcome.

Read the full story

We’re just 12 days away from the AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting in Las Vegas (Feb 28th-March 3rd). Hard to know whether there will be a knock-down, dragged-out fight, with one or more internationals declaring they are leaving the Federation and someone stepping forward to announce he or she is running for AFL-CIO President at the […]

Read the full story

I learned tonight from a reliable source on Capitol Hill that the Inspector General of the Department of Labor has agreed to probe the sweetheart deal the agency struck with Wal-Mart that let the company get away with a puny $135,000 and change fine and a promise the DOL would give Wal-Mart a 15-day heads-up […]

Read the full story

Thinking about Wal-Mart’s child labor violations reminded me of an international effort around violations of labor rights worldwide. The Campaign to Abolish Sweatshops and Child Labor had put together a piece of legislation that would “require companies to disclose information related to potential violations of core labor standards, by preventing a market for goods made […]

Read the full story

Bill Greider has a must-read piece in the Feb. 28th issue of The Nation on the potential power of public pensions to reshape public policy. The potential use of public pension funds, which is essentially money invested on behalf of unionized public employees, has been talked about for more than twenty years. But, we’ve got […]

Read the full story