Labor's War on Global Warming
Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello & Brendan Smith : Peace Activism
Together, unions can force the government to take on the issue of green-collar jobs.
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Firestone's Super Bowl Fumble
Ruthie Ackerman : Liberia
Few people watching the Firestone-sponsored Super Bowl halftime show are aware of the company's reputation in Liberia for harsh working conditions, child labor and environmental ruin.
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Right to Strike Imperiled in Cananea
David Bacon : Mexico
If the Mexican government and Grupo Mexico succeed in smashing a miners' strike, the reverberations will be felt even across the US border.
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Beyond the Labor Board
Max Fraser
Partisan appointments to Bush's National Labor Relations Board have ensured it's virtually impossible for workers to get a fair shake.
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Noted.
The Editors
Guest blogging at The Nation.com, gazing into Kristol's ball, revisiting Hoover's roundup.
2007
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Writers of the World Unite
Luvh Rakhe : Internet & New Media
Striking members of the Writers Guild of America are bringing the labor movement something it hasn't had for a long time: an audience.
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Farmworkers and Students Take On Burger King
Michael Gould-Wartofsky : Wages & Hours
The fast-food giant's insistence on paying poverty wages to tomato pickers could backfire, as student activists' campaign for fair food cuts into their business.
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Permalancers, Unite!
Freelancers staged a walkout at Viacom this week, instigating one of the most unlikely and successful labor campaigns in recent memory.
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WGA: Picket and Click It
Christopher Lisotta : Internet & New Media
As the strike continues, Writers Guild members have turned the Internet into an organizing tool.
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Writers Strike, Silence Falls
Barbara Ehrenreich : Television
As the screenwriters strike enters its second week, take a moment to appreciate those without whom late night comics are struck mute, movies are left unmade and on TV, there's nothing but reality.
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Whatever Happened to the Eight-Hour Day?
Steve Early & Suzanne Gordon : Wages & Hours
Americans spend more time on the job than workers in any other country. Isn't it time presumably labor-friendly Democrats did something about it?
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Father of History
Christopher Phelps : Progressives, Liberals, & The American Left
Bettina Aptheker's recent memoir has incited fierce debate over her father s legacy.
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UAW R.I.P.?
Max Fraser : United Auto Workers (UAW)
To save the domestic auto industry, the UAW may end up killing itself.
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South Africa's Winter of Discontent
William Johnson : South Africa
As the gap widens between rich and poor, millions of black workers are challenging African National Congress rule. How did a victory against apartheid turn into class war?
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Argentina: Where Jobless Run Factories
Naomi Klein & Avi Lewis : Argentina
Almost entirely under the media radar, unemployed workers here are taking over bankrupt businesses and reopening them under democratic management.
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Andy Stern: Savior or Sellout?
Liza Featherstone : Health Insurance
SEIU President Andy Stern heads one of the strongest unions in the country. Why is he so cozy with corporations?
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Michael Moore's Sicko
Michael Moore's healthcare documentary is less partisan, less outrageous--but more real--than anything he's done before.
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Coming to America
The US guest-worker program has locked thousands in a modern-day form of indentured servitude.
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Laboring for Edwards
Marc Cooper : Electoral Politics
John Edwards is meticulously laying the groundwork to become the candidate of organized labor, insisting prosperity can expand only if unionization expands.
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Murder in Monterrey
A labor organizer was beaten to death after exposing exploitative labor practices in the United States and Mexico.
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Workers, Not Guests
David Bacon : Immigration to the US
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is using immigration control measures to retaliate against undocumented workers who stand up for their rights.
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Living-Wage Victory in LA
Low-wage workers in hotels near Los Angeles International Airport are the latest to benefit from the city's living-wage law, riding a wave of considerable political momentum.
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Heck-of -a-Job Myers?
Rick Perlstein : Immigration to the US
The ICE chief's comments about immigration and unions raise troubling questions. Congress should seek answers.
2006
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Recognizing Labor
Unions are pushing hard for the new Congress to ease the process of organizing labor by passing the Employee Free Choice Act.
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Smithfield Walkout Challenges Agribiz Giant
Katrina vanden Heuvel : Food & Nutrition
Last week's walkout at the Smithfield Packing Company was a significant victory for labor organizers and exploited undocumented workers at the North Carolina plant.
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Downsized but Not Out
Barbara Ehrenreich & Tamara Draut
United Professionals, a new organization for college-educated workers at risk in a global economy, is joining the movement for economic justice.
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Laboring Toward Election Day
Despite the split following the 2004 election, labor groups are gearing up for the November elections like never before.
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Hog Hell
Eric Schlosser : Working Conditions
Low wages, segregation and dangerous working conditions in a North Carolina factory reveal a meatpacking industry where labor laws no longer matter.
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Hard Labor
The organic label means your food is pesticide-free, but an investigation into California farms reveals that the label means nothing but pain for the workers who produced it.
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Baseball Begins to Listen to Sweatshop Foes
Dave Zirin & Derek Tyner : Sports
After pressure from the local newspaper and the City Council questioning the use of sweatshop labor to create Pittsburgh Pirates regalia, Major League Baseball seems willing to listen to activists' complaints.
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Mexico's Labor Rebels
David Bacon : Working Conditions
On July 2, Mexico will choose a new president. Whoever wins will face an ongoing labor movement challenging the neoliberal policies of the past.
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Harlan County Blues
Erik Reece : Working Conditions
Life remains cheap in the coalfields of Appalachia because of the Bush Administration's incompetence and neglect in the face of human and environmental tragedy.
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Why Mine Deaths Are Up
Peter Dreier : Working Conditions
The May 20 mine disaster presents more evidence that the Bush Administration places miners in peril with budget cuts, regulatory rollbacks and industry-friendly appointees.
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The Case Against Coke
A global, grassroots campaign against Coca-Cola is using product bans and lawsuits to shed light on the corporate giant's exploitation and brutality in Colombia, India and elsewhere.
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Envisioning Another World: Integración Desde Abajo
Roberto Lovato : Labor & Immigration
Immigrant advocates at the World Social Forum offered real alternatives to the narrow debate over how to fix the system.
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Reversing 'Right to Work'
Labor activists in Idaho hope to repeal repressive "Right To Work" laws and educate a new generation on the history of labor struggles.
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Working-Class Hero
William P. Jones : African-Americans
While the edges continue to be smoothed off Martin Luther King Jr.'s bracing challenges to racism, war and free-market exploitation, the holiday is a time to remember a leader who believed civil rights and labor rights are tightly intertwined.
2005
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New York's Real Transit Crisis
New York City's first transit strike in a quarter-century resulted in an agreement that both the union leadership and the MTA insist is the greatest contract ever--but that the union's left opposition calls a disastrous sell-out.
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A Fight for the Future
Joshua B. Freeman : Working Conditions
New York City transit workers, now back on the job after a two-day strike, are fighting for the rights of future workers and against the lie that abstract, neutral economic necessity, not the ideas and interests of the rich and powerful, are driving the demolition of what remains of social solidarity.
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Bitter Winter at NYU
Scott Sherman : Higher Education
Striking graduate teaching assistants and NYU administrators are hunkered down for a protracted fight, as President John Sexton has threatened strikers with loss of their teaching stipend and ability to teach. This could have a chilling effect on campus union organizing nationwide.
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NYU's Poison Ivy Itch
When one of New York's biggest and most liberal institutions gets into the business of union-busting, it's hardly an internal matter.
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Solidarity, 25 Years Later
That brief explosion in Gdansk of civic participation and political innovation contains secrets and gems of political ideals that can be achieved.
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The Resurgence of Movement Politics
David Sirota : Campaigns & Elections
It's time for progressives to stop acting like losers and learn how to beat conservatives at their own game.
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States of Disunion
In the wake of the labor split, nothing revolutionary or even progressive is discernible in this schism.
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A Welcome Return to Enforcing Labor Laws
The abysmal cases of slave labor in the US are both shocking and terribly mundane.
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Labor Splits
: Labor
In the aftermath of the labor split, both sides must get beyond recriminations and hold themselves to common goals.
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Look Who's Walking
David Moberg reports on the union dissidents leaving the AFL-CIO.
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Labor Splits Open
As its July convention approaches, the AFL-CIO is on the brink of a major break-up.
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Is Union-busting Bad for Business?
About those secret payments, alligator boots, and how to "Love Mom, Not Wal-Mart."
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Race to the Bottom
Wal-Mart hopes to defeat its opponents by exploiting their racial divisions.
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On the Money
Massive resources are at stake in the debate roiling the AFL-CIO's Las Vegas summit.
2004
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A Moral Minimum Wage
Peter Dreier & Kelly Candaele : Democratic Party
The Democrats should start framing economic justice as a moral issue.
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Union Makes Its Bed
Kelly Candaele & Peter Dreier : Unions
The American labor movement recognizes that if it does not grow, it will wither away.
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Tyson's Moral Anchor
Eric Schlosser : Working Conditions
One of America's finest union leaders and her supporters are now under assault by one of the nation's meanest, toughest corporations.
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Will Labor Take the Wal-Mart Challenge?
Liza Featherstone : Working Conditions
Under the gun, unions are realizing they have to think outside the big box.
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Florida...Again?
Marc Cooper : Democratic Party
Florida remains the most evenly divided state in a deeply polarized America.
2003
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Wal-Mart's Big City Blues
The mega-retailer has set its sights on the urban market, but the living-wage movement is putting up a fight.
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Wal-Mart in China
One thing about Wal-Mart in China is familiar. The company's labor problems are making headlines.
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A Watershed Strike
Kelly Candaele & Peter Dreier : California
The retail food workers strike in California may be the first in a series of battles that could shape the future of labor-management relations throughout the US.
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Yale Workers Win
How did the Yale workers win? Through militant picket lines and community support.
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Labor Fights for Rights
David Moberg : National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)
Workers have lost the right to organize. A new effort aims to get it back.
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A New Solidarity Front in Iraq
Tim Shorrock : Iraqi Reconstruction/ Occupation
This fall will see a fact-finding mission to Iraq to evaluate the condition of workers and the status of the labor movement.
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Labor's Health Problem
While fighting givebacks, unions can't lose sight of the big healthcare picture.
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Guns or Butter
Bob Muhlenkamp : Peace Activism
"Our job is to make sure that the labor movement talks about how the militarization of US foreign policy hurts workers at home."
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Telecom Labor Rising
Larry Cohen & Steve Early : Corporate Responsibility & Accountability
Union members are making links between customers' concerns and their own.
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The Naked and the Red
Led by a former Boeing machinist, Las Vegas exotic dancers are talking union.
2002
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WWJD? Protest Wal-Mart!
A nationwide Day of Action on November 21 drew attention to the big-box retailer's small-minded ways.
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Antiwar Labor Pains
Unions are edging into the peace movement, but they are still minor players.
This week: Can Barack Obama be a "People's President," or is his move to the center for good? Betsy Reed, Doug Henwood, Jo-Ann Mort, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Gary Younge debate. (13mb mp3)
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