Working Life

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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So, I’m checking in on the Campaign for America’s Future conference in the nation’s capitol. We’re at the Washington Hilton, also known in popular lore as the Hinkley Hilton (for those who need the reminder, John Hinkley took his best shot at Ronald Reagan here). The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank weighs in today (registration required) […]

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…why muck around somewhere else? That’s what I thought when reading Matt Richtel’s piece today in The New York Times about the struggles of the Communications Workers Union to organize in the telecommunications industry. It’s possible that Richtel has his facts wrong–I never doubt that possibility when reading the Times (for example, it cannot be […]

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For some time, I’ve known about the secret film about Wal-Mart that the video warrior Robert Greenwald is putting together. He asked that people keep it under wraps so that he could try to rustle up some Wal-Mart workers to talk on camera before the company disappeared them…okay, Wal-Mart hasn’t, as far I know, gone […]

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So, why are progressives relatively silent about the blistering corporate attack against the traditional defined-benefit pension plan? Why is the movement not organizing mass street demonstrations? I ask these questions and look at the crisis in today’s “Working in America” column for TomPaine.com. Now it’s your chance: what do you think should be done?

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If you’re looking for the next possible key turn-of-the-screw development in the labor movement’s saga, keep your eye on a few days in June. On June 10-12th, the executive board of the Service Employees meets in San Francisco. At that meeting, it’s expected that the board will give Andy Stern the authority to pull SEIU […]

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The blind men on the editorial board of The New York Times are at least consistent when it comes to pontificating about trade. This a.m., we’re treated to an editorial “A New Battle Over Free Trade,“(registration required) which gives us the view from the establishment press on the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Right […]

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