Working Life

A breakfast conversation with the ubiquitous “senior labor official.”: We have pursued a political electoral strategy to address our organizing deficiencies. We were digging a hole with a shovel and now we’re pursuing a course of let’s get a bigger shovel. In 1995, we had a window, people weren’t against union so we spent a […]

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The sun has just risen here in Vegas as the first official day of the AFL-CIO meeting begins. But, there has already been a massive amount of behind-the-scenes meetings. All day yesterday, there were a series of official meetings but what was far more interesting were the unofficial meetings. If you remember, the New Unity […]

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We’re less than 24 hours away from the opening of the AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting in Las Vegas. Over the weekend, aside from brushing up on my blackjack and craps knowledge, I finished a Tom Paine column on what to watch for at the meeting to determine whether anything substantive is going to change. After […]

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In Canada, it’s a different story when it comes to trying to form a union–at least workers have some belief that the law might stand by them. On Friday, the labor board in Quebec told Wal-Mart it had to stop initimating workers who were trying to organize a store in a suburb of Quebec. Of […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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.” […]

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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, […]

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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.

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