Working Life

The fax machine is humming…John Wilhelm, president of the hospitality industry division of UNITE HERE, resigned yesterday from the Federation’s Immigration Committee. In a very tough letter to John Sweeney, Wilhelm blamed a “!6th Street focus” for creating divisions on immigration that Wilhelm says will now arise at the convention. A couple of thoughts as […]

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A friend sent along this little missive yesterday from out in Los Angeles and asked me to post it. The writer is Julie Butcher, general manager of SEIU Local 347, which represents 12,000 public employees in Southern California. The upshot: she wants the labor movement to change but isn’t sure that disaffiliation is the right […]

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So, here we are a week out from the opening of the convention (there is an Executive Council meeting this Friday and a variety of pre-convention meetings and forums on the weekend). Here’s what we know today: Various players are still trying to see if a deal can be made. Last week, the insurgent leaders […]

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As my Yogi philosopher would tell me, “it feels like déjà vu all over again.” I remember being involved in the tussles over the labor movement’s retrograde foreign policy positions back in the 1980s when the AFL-CIO was closely linked to the U.S. government’s foreign policy, which, then, was supporting the Ollie North-supplied Nicaraguan contras […]

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I thought this would be a useful document for people to read. Stewart Acuff, the AFL-CIO’s organizing director, recently spoke to the Illinois state fed. He gives an overview of the state of labor, organizing efforts and the sorry state of the labor laws.

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A week ago, I gave everyone a heads-up on the the rumblings happening down in Australia. The government has unleased a broad attack against the labor movement–but unions are fighting back. An old friend of mine, Chris Warren, is head of the Media Extertainment and Arts Alliance, a federation of media unions. I asked him […]

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(Slight technical problem delayed our start here today) As some have noticed, Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers of America, responded yesterday to my post “On Language And Reality.” I’ve known Leo for probably a dozen years or so (maybe longer…his grey cells and mine probably don’t fire as well as they used to). […]

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Last night, I weighed in on the significance of NY Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s endorsement by the huge city workers local, AFSCME DC37. This morning, The New York Times runs with a front-page story main section story on the endorsement this morning, confirming the general perception that it is lights out for any of the Democrats […]

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No, we’re not back in English class (something I never could stomach, as my writing perhaps reveals). I’m just endlessly curious and fascinated by the framing of the debate about the future of labor. This morning, I was specifically thinking about how so many of us have been seized or paralyzed by the language of […]

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On and off, over the past few months, I’ve gotten various comments from leaders of Central Labor Council and State Feds about the whole hoo-hah going on, as many of them see it, back there in Washington D.C. The rumblings have picked up a bit… Below is a resolution passed a few weeks ago by […]

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