Working Life

We know it’s not easy to unionize. It just got easier, at least for people in the railway and airline industries.   The Federal Register out today announces: The National Mediation Board overhauled a decades-old election rule to make it easier for airline and railway employees to unionize, in a sign that labor is getting […]

Read the full story

   My friends at the Center for Economic Policy and Research have this new report: This report reviews the characteristics of the immigrant workforce and analyzes the impact of unionization on the pay and benefits of immigrant workers. According to the most recent available data, immigrant workers are now over 15 percent of the workforce […]

Read the full story

   It’s old news by now that the nomination of Craig Becker to be a member of the National Labor Relations Board has been blocked–or, as the British like to say in a more interesting way, scuppered. Understand that Becker actually got 52 votes–FIFTY-TWO–in favor of his appointment. In my long-ago civics class, I was […]

Read the full story

We are being distracted by numbers that are a sideshow. The new Gross Domestic Product numbers and the obsession about the fiscal deficits are obscuring the real problem in America–wages.   Yes, we have a massive jobs crisis. I have been pretty clearly supporting the idea that we need far bigger stimulus and that the […]

Read the full story

   Maybe it slipped by me but the president never used the word "union" in last night’s State of The Union address. Kudos to him for talking about the jobs crisis in America, and he correctly criticized the immoral and irresponsible behavior of too many Wall Street bankers and the Supreme Court’s decision to let […]

Read the full story

Solidarity is one of the bedrock principles of the labor movement. It has a pretty sound strategic and tactical basis: you can’t win if your ranks are divided. I don’t mean that you can’t have debate. I mean that we have to support certain general principles. Here is an example: public employees are not to […]

Read the full story

The Republican world view of "national security" has been laid bare–ideology is more important than the security of the people. In my view, the fallout from the airplane terror plot makes this abundantly clear.   I start from my own touchstones about the definition of "national security": it is a measure of how the people […]

Read the full story

    There was a bit of wisdom that one could gain from the airline terror plot that, in my view, says a lot about the Republican view of the world and our own definition of national security. Yesterday, to its credit, The New York Times had an editorial entitled "Senator DeMint’s Priorities," which made this […]

Read the full story

Today is Human Right Day. This morning, I paused to think about the soaring notion of human rights and, at the same time, the many challenges we face to achieve human rights.   Here is the preamble to the 1948 United Nation Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of […]

Read the full story

   This should not surprise anyone who is actually out there trying to organize workers: Over the last quarter century, the unionized workforce has changed dramatically, according to this new CEPR report. In 2008, union workers reflected trends in the workforce as a whole toward a greater share of women, Latinos, Asian Pacific Americans, older, […]

Read the full story