Working Life

I just received from the AFL-CIO’s Lane Windham a letter John Sweeny sent to John Wilhelm yesterday in response to Wilhelm’s resignation as chair of the Federation’s Immigration Committee. Sweeney expresses regret at Wilhelm’s resignation but also says that Wilhelm mischaracterizes the current state-of-play on immigration. As Sweeney sees it, UNITE HERE has departed from […]

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My phone and e-mail were all abuzz yesterday with one question: is it going to really happen? The “it” being, of course, the pull-out of one or more unions from the AFL-CIO. I had calls from reporters who wanted to know what my crystal ball shows. I’ll be honest, I can’t tell you for sure. […]

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The fax machine is humming…John Wilhelm, president of the hospitality industry division of UNITE HERE, resigned yesterday from the Federation’s Immigration Committee. In a very tough letter to John Sweeney, Wilhelm blamed a “!6th Street focus” for creating divisions on immigration that Wilhelm says will now arise at the convention. A couple of thoughts as […]

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A friend sent along this little missive yesterday from out in Los Angeles and asked me to post it. The writer is Julie Butcher, general manager of SEIU Local 347, which represents 12,000 public employees in Southern California. The upshot: she wants the labor movement to change but isn’t sure that disaffiliation is the right […]

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So, here we are a week out from the opening of the convention (there is an Executive Council meeting this Friday and a variety of pre-convention meetings and forums on the weekend). Here’s what we know today: Various players are still trying to see if a deal can be made. Last week, the insurgent leaders […]

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As my Yogi philosopher would tell me, “it feels like déjà vu all over again.” I remember being involved in the tussles over the labor movement’s retrograde foreign policy positions back in the 1980s when the AFL-CIO was closely linked to the U.S. government’s foreign policy, which, then, was supporting the Ollie North-supplied Nicaraguan contras […]

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I thought this would be a useful document for people to read. Stewart Acuff, the AFL-CIO’s organizing director, recently spoke to the Illinois state fed. He gives an overview of the state of labor, organizing efforts and the sorry state of the labor laws.

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A week ago, I gave everyone a heads-up on the the rumblings happening down in Australia. The government has unleased a broad attack against the labor movement–but unions are fighting back. An old friend of mine, Chris Warren, is head of the Media Extertainment and Arts Alliance, a federation of media unions. I asked him […]

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(Slight technical problem delayed our start here today) As some have noticed, Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers of America, responded yesterday to my post “On Language And Reality.” I’ve known Leo for probably a dozen years or so (maybe longer…his grey cells and mine probably don’t fire as well as they used to). […]

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Here are the seeds of a revolution–and even the elites are starting to see the danger. Used to be, if you worked your ass off and worked more efficiently, that would translate into more money in your paycheck. Not anymore, as I observe in the most recent installment of my TomPaine.com “Working in America” series. […]

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