Portside

The way major U.S. companies provide for retiring workers has been shifting for about three decades, with more dropping traditional pensions every year. The first full generation of workers to retire since this turn offers a sobering preview of a labor force more and more dependent on their own savings for retirement.

Just cause — a legal right to your job — should be an essential part of any package of reforms to restore workplace dignity and fairness.

Labor still has the power to throw sand in the gears of exploitation. The next step is for all these disparate troublemakers to start seeing their workplace struggles—from defending pensions to defending refugees—as part of the same bigger movement.

Thanks to strong bargaining power, the IG Metall union, which represents some 3.9 million workers in the metal and electrical industries, is pushing for a 6% wage increase and a 28-hour week for a two-year period — with limited impact on wages.

The morning after, I felt a fear unlike any I had felt before. The right side of my chest hurt, my stomach felt strange. I was hungry, but couldn’t bring myself to eat. I could just think of one thing: if Donald Trump’s DHS Secretary does not approve our renewals, then we’d potentially be forced to return El Salvador. As of today, I have 81 days left on my TPS work permit if the designation isn’t renewed by DHS.

The election of Donald Trump produced a rash of commentaries heralding the death of organized labor, or at minimum an existential crisis. Although these epitaphs are not new and are very overblown, it is true that organized labor prematurely backed the corporate Democrat, failed to elect the candidate it did back, and is left divided over how to deal with the presidency of Donald Trump.

On September 3, 1991, the Imperial Food Products plant in Hamlet, North Carolina burst into flames. Twenty-five people died, trapped behind the locked doors of the red-brick factory. Most of the victims were women; many were women of color, most were single moms. Another sixty people were injured, and the blast left more than fifty children orphaned. Local officials called the fire an accident, but the women and men who worked at Imperial had been made vulnerable by the factory’s owners as well as public policy.

Ceding exclusive representation in order to write non-members off rather than winning them over will not result in the labor movement growing or becoming any more militant or successful.

Labor still has the power to throw sand in the gears of exploitation. The next step is for all these disparate troublemakers to start seeing their workplace struggles—from defending pensions to defending refugees—as part of the same bigger movement.

Trump promises to protect US jobs have proven false as Nabisco shuts down its Chicago plant to move to Mexico and Ford reneges onits promise to reinvest in Detroit. Under the new tax bill, even more manufacturing jobs are likely to move overseas.