Portside

The dispute is not over their wages. It's Honeywell that's demanding deep concessions in their new 5-year contract, including the elimination of cost-of-living increases and pensions for new workers, cuts in overtime pay, subcontracting out work, restricting representation rights, and more.

In 2014, the last year with full statistics, 899 construction workers nationwide died from workplace injuries. The reason: loss of union strength and decline in OSHA funding. President Trump's anti-union and anti-federal spending polices promise to only make the situation worse.

DC 37 Executive Director Henry Garrido wrote, "we are carrying out our own "100 Days of Resistance" fight-back and I pledge that we will not back down in the next four years". DC 37 represents 125,000 municipal workers in New York City.

If New Hampshire, Missouri and Kentucky succeed in enacting "right-to-work" bills, it would be the most states rolling back union power in one year since 1947, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Success in New Hampshire would also make it the first state in the Northeast with a "right-to-work" law. The bills are a further reflection of organized labor's falling clout. Just 10.7 percent of American workers belonged to a labor union in 2016.

Today, workers at the city’s Nissan plant are facing a familiar backlash in their 12-year struggle for the right to organize a union. In a show of solidarity, this week cities across the South also steeped in civil rights history — Atlanta, Birmingham, Charlotte, Greensboro and Nashville — are organizing local actions to support the Canton workers and build regional pressure on Nissan to allow free union elections.

The new figures have just come out, and we are slightly down again.

Dockworkers in Oakland, California refused to show up to work to show their opposition to Trump's agenda on the day of his inauguration. Their strike demonstrated the potential power ordinary people have on the job, when organized.

The Service Employee International Union, along with other public sector and service industry unions, was not invited to President Trump's meeting with certain union leaders. Its President Mary Kay Henry expects to be hit hard by Trump's cuts. She hopes by expanding the Fight for $15 campaign support for unions will broaden.

That states can pass laws banning mandatory union dues is not new. Congress amended labor law in 1947 to allow individual states to pass right-to-work laws. “How it affects the workforce is really simple: It lowers wages,” said Stephen Herzenberg, executive director of the Keystone Research Center. “If you strip it to its core, this is about reducing the power of workers to bargain for a decent living.”

Some critics, including some in the labor movement, suggest that unions have to abandon collective bargaining and pursue other strategies for worker gains, such as winning higher wages through legislation. But collective bargaining can still work, and it is still necessary.