Working Life

Okay, if you want to read the entire deal, word for word, just click here for a Word document, which was just passed to me late yesterday. It’s basically as I reported on Monday. Apparently, the Federation’s management took a hard line that, in order to take advantage of the incentive package, people had to […]

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After a lot of tension, the Newspaper Guild, which represents the AFL-CIO’s professional staff, has made a deal with the Federation for an incentive package to “encourage” people to leave the AFL-CIO before the announced cuts become official. I guess the more people who leave before the layoffs go into effect in the Fall, the […]

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Off of yesterday’s post on John Sweeney’s letter re: affiliation with Central Labor Bodies by non-AFL-CIO unions, a couple of people in the know mused whether SEIU’s pull-out from the Federation would be treated like the Carpenters or not. One perspective: “You missed one critical phrase in the letter,” wrote one labor insider. He pointed […]

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This just landed in my e-mail box from Norma Rae (hey,this is labor, no Deep Throats here…and that’s so ’70s anyway). Below is a letter from John Sweeney to the leadership in the field, basically telling people that local unions that belong to unaffiliated international unions can’t join local labor councils. It’s obvious that this […]

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…why muck around somewhere else? That’s what I thought when reading Matt Richtel’s piece today in The New York Times about the struggles of the Communications Workers Union to organize in the telecommunications industry. It’s possible that Richtel has his facts wrong–I never doubt that possibility when reading the Times (for example, it cannot be […]

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So, why are progressives relatively silent about the blistering corporate attack against the traditional defined-benefit pension plan? Why is the movement not organizing mass street demonstrations? I ask these questions and look at the crisis in today’s “Working in America” column for TomPaine.com. Now it’s your chance: what do you think should be done?

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If you’re looking for the next possible key turn-of-the-screw development in the labor movement’s saga, keep your eye on a few days in June. On June 10-12th, the executive board of the Service Employees meets in San Francisco. At that meeting, it’s expected that the board will give Andy Stern the authority to pull SEIU […]

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When a Starbucks opened up in my neighborhood, a number of us saw this as a bad thing and a sign of decline. Of course, since the place seems busy all day with people hanging out (what DO these people do for a living?), it seems like a losing battle to whine about yet another […]

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Here I was on Sunday thinking, it’s finally gotten warm, I’m going to get on my bike (as opposed to doing the inside-the-gym thing) and I’m going to ignore the blog today. And, then, I had to read Nicholas Kristof’s column in today’s NYTimes. What a dope. He repeats the usual blind points about China’s […]

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It was on my pile to do but…the insurgents got there first. They put together a comparison of their proposal (entitled “Restoring the American Dream”) versus the proposal released by the AFL-CIO officers (entitled “Winning For Working Families”). You can judge for yourself whether the comparison is accurate. I’ll try to get my own comparison […]

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