Working Life

Today is going to be a wild, red-hot day in the debate over the future of labor—and there is new movement to report in the forces at play here. The insurgents (UNITE-HERE, Teamsters, Laborers, SEIU and UFCW) will be releasing a new set of proposals and initiatives today that was hammered out at the recent […]

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Freddy Ferrer may be tanking and it may be too late but he just got a small lifeline by netting the endorsement of the Transport Workers Union in NYC. I’m not going to give the whole history here but, for those of you outside NYC, Ferrer is the former Bronx borough president who ran in […]

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I’ve been writing about labor rights and the world economy for so long that I was a bit suspicious after first reading Elizabeth Becker’s May 12th piece in The New York Times entitled “Low Cost and Sweatshop-Free.” (a side note: the web version of this article does not carry that headline but only the sub-head: […]

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So, what would you do if you were, along with your mommy, the richest woman in the world, but your workers either can’t afford health insurance or have to pay through the nose to get pathetic insurance and, as a matter of policy, your CEO tells the world that your company doesn’t expect its pay […]

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I did a stretch of seven years in Los Angeles so I keep my ear to the ground on whatever is happening there in the house of labor. The last couple of weeks, I keep hearing from friends who are holding their breathe, hoping that Antonio Villaraigosa beats incumbent Mayor Jim Hahn in the election […]

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You want an obscene contrast between the absolute flogging American workers are getting versus how big corporations are getting off? Compare the scandalous termination of the pension plans for 134,000 United Airlines workers, on the one hand, to the passage of the bankruptcy bill (with Democratic Party support), on the other hand. On the one […]

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So, late last night I got a report from the Teamsters big conference in Vegas, where the heads of the five unions composing the “insurgent caucus”— the Teamsters, SEIU, Laborers, UNITE-HERE and UFCW—came together in front of a raucous crowd composed mainly of Teamsters but also including rank-and-file members from each union scattered through the […]

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A couple of days ago, I wondered in Flotsam and Jetsam whether the Central American Free Trade Agreement was on the rocks. Today, Elizabeth Becker of The New York Times writes that, “Social Security is not the administration’s only economic initiative that is in trouble in Congress. The current centerpiece of President Bush’s trade agenda, […]

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Late last night, I heard just a bit of information out of Vegas (I had other commitments so cannot be on the scene, unfortunately…need to win back that money from March). There is not yet a candidate to challenge John Sweeney. Obviously, as I reported, John Wilhelm doesn’t want to jump in unless there seems […]

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This week could be the week that John Wilhelm announces that he is running for AFL-CIO president–or not. He’s got the right forum: all the presidents from the unions loosely gathered in the “insurgent” caucus are going to be out in my favorite place, Las Vegas, for a big Teamsters shindig…There will be the usual […]

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