Lawmakers must stop functioning as handmaidens to the rich in an economic scheme that has failed the 99 percent from the very day the 1 percent got Ronald Reagan to buy it.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, battled organized labor regularly during his first term over contracts and pensions. Now, just weeks after his re-election, he's roiled the Public Employees Federation, the white-collar state employees union, by attempting to turn more than 2,500 union jobs into nonunion posts.
Congressional Progressive Caucus urged members to reject the so-called Cromnibus if a provision which helps big banks trade derivatives in units backstopped by a government guarantee remained in the spending measure. This kind of activity was a cause of the 2008 crisis - it a giveaway to wealthy campaign donors and Wall Street banks. Analysis for more information about key takeaways from the proposed spending bill, as well as a few controversial surprises.
Election day round up shows a few union victories in local races and in referendums even in conservative states despite the over all tide of labor defeats. When voters saw working-class issues directly on the ballot, like raising the minimum wage or guaranteeing sick leave, they voted for them.
Rebuilding labor means more than ticking off new non-white members, however, it also means transformation—and when it comes to workers of color that means integrating individual on-the-job concerns with “off-the-clock” community concerns like climate change, racial profiling, mass incarceration and, certainly, police violence. And therein lies the rub for organized labor as it looks toward the future.
Whether the split between labor and the Democratic Party in Ohio is temporary or permanent, the ongoing peace talks between the Democrats and labor leaders haven’t quelled labor’s urge to become the dominant political force in the county. Activists are aware that labor support for an independent mayoral candidate in 2015 could burn another bridge back to the Democratic Party.
"… the question of unity brings up a hard subject, a subject all of us know about but few want to- acknowledge -- race. Because the reality is that while a young man named Michael Brown died just a short distance from us in Ferguson, from gunshot wounds from a police officer, other young men of color have died and will die in similar circumstances, in communities all across this country. … Because the reality is we still have racism in America."
Koch Sisters; Art, art damned Koch; Whose booty? Our booty; White rage; The forsaken; Invisible money
Most liberals continue to pay lip service to unions and their importance to the Democratic coalition. But in private, many will tell you that they have little use for them. Julian Zelizer, a Princeton political economist, argues that the marriage between liberalism and organized labor “took a terrible turn starting in the 1970s,” when global competition moved manufacturing jobs from the unionized Northeast and Midwest to the non-union South and, ultimately, abroad.
Trade union delegates to the US-Africa summit stressed that economic ties and growth are not enough. They stressed that there needs to be "a more complex view of development," that addresses the issue of growing inequality. As an example, delegates noted that it is not enough to talk about job creation, attention must also be paid to the kind of jobs being created.
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