Working Life

I found the MSM accounts of the deeper cuts at General Motors (5,000 more workers to lose their jobs on top of the 25,000 UAW members who already faced the axe) pretty woeful, primarily because the stories typically refer only in passing to the role health care costs play in the demise of GM and […]

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Over the past few months, I’ve made it a habit to try to hold Democrats accountable for their votes or actions when it comes to labor-related votes. A few people yelp: why are you picking on Democrats? My friends, we know how Republicans are going to act (sure, that’s an over generalization–there are a few […]

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The AFL-CIO has developed a cool tool–though it’s a pretty sobering one. It’s the job tracker. The job tracker has data on some 60,000 companies, and spits out information on many of their misdeeds. You can check out, by state and community, which companies have outsourced jobs and which companies have a record involving violations […]

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The strike at Northwest Airlines is continuing. As part of a campaign to save the jobs of the mechanics at Northwest, the union is now targeting the company’s board of directors (it has hired Corporate Campaign as an outside consultant). Today, there is an interesting twist. It turns out that one of the members of […]

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Tomorrow, my friends are going to be on the picket line at New York University. You may remember that, actually, NYU graduate students lead the way in winning bargaining rights for all graduate students–except, then, the Bush Administration’s National Labor Relations board overturned the precedent that gave grad students those basic democratic rights. So, NYU, […]

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Before I go off to vote in the New York City mayoral election (for Freddy Ferrer, of course), I caught this item in today’s Wall Street Journal. I had heard about this Delphi coalition yesterday from a friend in the UAW. UAW, Other Unions Join Forces To Increase Pressure on DelphiBy KRIS MAHER in Pittsburgh […]

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No, I’m not referring to the indictments in the Plame affair (as I write this in the a.m., nothing announced other than it looks as if Rove might skate and Scooter will take the hit). It’s Delphi’s next shot at the UAW. You may remember it was the bankruptcy filing of Delphi that triggered the […]

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I can’t say that I disagree with the grim assessment in this front-page article in The Wall Street Journal (it’s a subscription so I’m providing it here, in full). But, since health care is such a big piece of what happens at the bargaining table, I think this crisis opens up an opportunity: a massive […]

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Tyson Foods has a pretty ugly reputation as a hard-nosed, nasty employer. There is a very ugly strike underway at the the company’s Lakeside Packers plant in Brooks, Alberta. As the UFCW reports, “Approximately 2,300 workers were forced on strike by Tyson Foods at the company’s Lakeside Packers plant in Brooks, Alberta, on Wednesday, October […]

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Let me start out by saying I don’t think John Sweeney or the top folks at the AFL-CIO are aware of this but it still is a bit disturbing. The Federation is doing business with a guy who is supporting efforts to destroy the labor movement in California… Here’s the story. I’ve written a few […]

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