Portside

Unlike all the other union-backed politicians who've run for president since the mid-1970s, Bernie Sanders was a labor solidarity activist long before he was elected to anything. 

A sexual harassment scandal at AFGE headquarters is making the union’s resistance to Trump more difficult.

UHW was an incubator of talent, organizers who are still bargaining for the common good, utilizing the power of the strike, and promoting a political agenda for labor that’s focused on issues, rather than personalities.

In the run-up to SEIU’s largest and most disastrous local union take-over—involving United Healthcare Workers (UHW)—some of the first punches where thrown at a Labor Notes conference in Dearborn, Michigan ten years ago this month.

It takes continuous organizational effort—in the form of training and recruitment, new leadership development, and structural change–to insure that the bullying, harassing, divide-and-conquer behavior of bosses, big and small, doesn’t infect and weaken the “house of labor” too.

Gonzalez, in his book Reclaiming Gotham: Bill De Blasio and the Movement to End America's Tale of Two Cities argues that de Blasio has presided over the “most left-leaning government in the history of America’s greatest city." He "reports that, under de Blasio, poor and working class New Yorkers have received a $21 billion “infusion of income and economic benefits” which also includes long deferred wage increases.

Whether he wins or loses, Sanders is already helpfully tapping into rank-and-file discontent about who gets to decide what in our unions. While other big union endorsements of Clinton may soon be announced, the Labor Day buzz—at the grassroots, in early primary states—is largely about Bernie.

Bernie Sanders has a long record of supporting pro-worker policies. Vermont union members learned long ago that the mutual benefit derived from their work with and for Sanders goes far beyond the results of labor’s usual (and sometimes tawdry) transactional relationships with public officeholders.

When workers feel collectively trapped in poorly performing unions that do not properly represent them, the most union-minded among them often believe that changing unions is their only hope. If switching to another union is not a viable option because of AFL rules or incumbent union manipulation of Labor Board procedures, the result will be more workplace anger, frustration, and resentment.

Oil workers belonging to the United Steel Workers of America put-up picket lines in Northern California, Texas, Kentucky and Washington State this week. It has been 35 years since Tony Mazzocchi helped lead a strike against big oil.