Working Life

When a Starbucks opened up in my neighborhood, a number of us saw this as a bad thing and a sign of decline. Of course, since the place seems busy all day with people hanging out (what DO these people do for a living?), it seems like a losing battle to whine about yet another […]

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Here I was on Sunday thinking, it’s finally gotten warm, I’m going to get on my bike (as opposed to doing the inside-the-gym thing) and I’m going to ignore the blog today. And, then, I had to read Nicholas Kristof’s column in today’s NYTimes. What a dope. He repeats the usual blind points about China’s […]

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It was on my pile to do but…the insurgents got there first. They put together a comparison of their proposal (entitled “Restoring the American Dream”) versus the proposal released by the AFL-CIO officers (entitled “Winning For Working Families”). You can judge for yourself whether the comparison is accurate. I’ll try to get my own comparison […]

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Next to Yogi, I always like to harken back to Deep Throat when I’m looking for an appropriate analogy. Not Linda Lovelace but the mysterious figure from Watergate who, apparently, said, when asked how to unravel the political scandal, “follow the money.” Well, to twist this slightly, if you want to know if a union […]

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Hmmmm…so, the United Auto Workers today endorsed John Sweeney for re-election. Before I go further, I remind people that I was a UAW local president and am still a proud UAW member so figure that into anything I say (or don’t say). The statement from UAW prez Ron Gettelfinger says that, “As AFL-CIO president, John […]

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A quick break from our on-going soap opera inside the AFL-CIO to talk about, uh, organizing–you know, that thing that all this hoo-hah is about. I’m all for beating the crap out of Wal-Mart and the Walton family until it starts behaving. But, there’s another Wal-Mart looming: Whole Foods. And, if we want to control […]

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The last couple of weeks, a lot of people have wanted to know what Ed McElroy is up to. As president of the American Federation of Teachers and, so far, a John Sweeney supporter, he carries 1.3 million votes. I did not believe one rumor that he was angling to run and instead, I believe, […]

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A relevant point to raise in the current debate over the future of the labor movement: listen up, sometimes old white guys can do the right thing (this being a bit of the bone of contention in the back and forth between Anonymous AFL-er and Union Maid over my post on seniority). Take Sol Stetin, […]

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Last week, I asked whether there was any international union president willing to say publicly that the seniority is a sacred union principle and that the way in which the AFL-CIO layoffs were structured potentially threatens that principle. I haven’t heard from any international president. But, I just got this letter that was written by […]

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My occassional clean-up of left-over stuff, just the antidote for Sunday easy reading– On the Wal-Mart Front–Good News, Bad News: The Beast has thrown in the towel, pretty quickly I might add, on the on-line DVD rental biz. Netflix’s head start in the business tailor-made for couch potatoes and parents with no baby sitters was […]

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