Working Life

Yesterday, Roger Toussaint, the president of the TWU Local 100 in New York City, was delivered to jail with a rousing march across the Brooklyn Bridge. Who knows what this will mean down the road. Maybe the memory of the march of 1,200 people will fade with time–or maybe people will look back at it […]

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Today, Roger Toussaint, the president of the transport workers union, begins his ten-day jail sentence in the infamous Tombs in NYC. Yours truly will be among a large crowd of unionists who will gather in Brooklyn and march with Touissaint across the Brooklyn Bridge. John Sweeney, the president of the AFL-CIO, will apparently also be […]

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All the major New York City news outlets are reporting a judge’s decision to hit Local 100 of the Transit Workers Union with a $2.5 million fine for the three-day strike last December. Worse, the judge has ordered a suspension of the union’s ability to automatically collect union dues through payroll deductions. As any union […]

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I’ve been on a kick, for many weeks, about the evils of the bankruptcy code–how can it be that companies are allowed to use the bankruptcy laws to destroy pensions (money that workers put away for future years) and attack union contracts…at the same time, by the way, that corporate CEOs continue to receive generous […]

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Worth reading. For the past year, the Global Policy Network (GPN) has been working closely with the Hemispheric Labour Organization (ORIT) to create Labour’s Platform for the Americas. The Platform was presented to presidents of the Americas when they met in Mar del Plata, Argentina in November 2005. It has been produced in four languages […]

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So, what would be the harm if nothing passed this week on immigration? After all, it’s only because Bill Frist, the majority leader of the Senate, demanded that a bill pass right now that there is a rush to ram something through. Wouldn’t it be better if we had no bill as opposed to a […]

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So, Delphi has done what is has threatened to do: it’s gone to court asking a judge for the right to tear up its labor agreements. This was not a surprise–the threats have been there for some time. It certainly made The New York Times’ list of important events, rating the front-page lead story: Delphi, […]

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One of perfect examples of the lack of basic democratic rights in our country is the Taylor Law. As many of you know, it prevents New York public employees in New York from striking–and imposes heavy penalties on people who try to exercise a right that is pretty basic in many other democracies. Yesterday, the […]

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We have a deadly mix in the economy: start with so-called “free trade” and globalization, add in a good helping of the disappearance of anti-trust laws, mix in the collapsing health care system and, then, for good measure, add a little dash of political parties rushing to please big corporations and, presto, you have corporations […]

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So, here’s a political take on the General Motors-UAW deal to pay workers to get out of Dodge. In one sense, for a bunch of workers who are near retirement and have over 30 years on the job this isn’t a terrible deal: if your kids are out of college and you have your house […]

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