Skip to main content

Labor Union Works to Persuade Voters Door-to-Door

Doug Livingston Akron Beacon Journal
While candidates and political parties use mostly volunteers to get the public to help them optimize ad spending, Working America aims to shape attitudes in face-to-face conversations, usually standing on a front stoop with a cracked screen door or a barking dog between a canvasser and a malleable voter. Over the past 12 years, the labor group has held repeat conversations on their front porches to advance progressive policies and candidates.

Clinton Snags AFL-CIO Official, Former Sanders Staffer, In Labor Outreach

Amanda Becker Reuters
Secretary Hillary Clinton has hired two deputy labor campaign directors. Lori D Orazio is coming from the AFL-CIO and formerly worked for the United Auto Workers. Michelle Gilliam was a staffer for Senator Bernie Sanders and before that was an organizer for a local chapter of the Transport Workers Union.

Immigrant Laborers Have a New Tool to Fight Back Against Rampant Wage Theft in the US

Kate Groetzinger, Frida Garza Quartz
The Jornalero app has three main functions: First, it allows day laborers to record the hours they work. Second, it allows them to file a wage theft report directly to a workers’ center from their phone. Third, it allows them to send out an alert when they experience wage theft, to warn other day laborers with the app about nonpaying employers in the area.

Labor Unions File Lawsuits Challenging 'Right-to-Work'

Phil Kabler Charleston Gazette-Mail
It compares the right-to-work law with laws passed in Southern states in the 1950s as part of the massive resistance to the U.S. Supreme Court’s desegregation orders in Brown v. Board of Education, with legislation intended to discourage membership in the NAACP — laws that were ultimately overturned in court for violating 1st and 14th Amendment rights of free expression and association.

New Labour's Contempt for Ordinary People Was to Going to Only Ever End in Disaster

Alan Simpson Morning Star
In the end, those who must live without hope easily turn to hate — or at least resentment. That is how we ended up with a referendum campaign that rarely reached beyond “fear” and “immigrants.” Throughout history, the right only feeds in the spaces vacated by progressive, inclusive politics. At least on the Labour side, much of the Leave vote has its roots more in poverty than in prejudice. And this is where Labour must begin.

How Unions and Environmental Groups are Finding Common Ground

Julie Grant Michigan Radio
Leaders in both the environmental and labor movements say the country could prevent more public health disasters like the toxic water crisis in Flint, Michigan, if old infrastructure is fixed or replaced -- like leaky drinking water pipes, and natural gas pipelines. And at the same time, the repairs would create jobs.

State Terrorism and Education, the New Speculative Sector in the Stock Market

Renata Bessi and Santiago Navarro F. El Enemigo Común
(Orginally published in Spanish on SubVersiones, see links at the end.) If the national teachers movement in Mexico manages to bring down the educational reform, there will be a path to bringing down all the structural reforms that are occurring in the country’s strategic sectors, such as the energy sector. This is the assessment that teachers are making. This is precisely the fear of the federal government.

The Master/Servant Relationship: A Medieval Horror Romance

Peter Hall-Jones New Unionism
Why do we defer from 9 to 5? The “master-servant relationship” is a feudal phantom that still haunts today’s workplaces, thanks to English common law. Peter Hall-Jones argues that it’s time to exorcise the old ghoul. The workplace democracy movement aims to do just that, but where do unions fit in? The way they respond to this agenda might well determine their relevance in the workplace of the future.

Enforcement of Puerto Rico’s Colonial Debt Pushes Out Young Workers

José A. Laguarta Ramírez Dollars & Sense
As living conditions in Puerto Rico continue to deteriorate students and young workers from the island will continue to flood those places where family connections and job opportunities pull them. Not all will be targets of violence because of their multiple identities, as the Orlando victims were. Their fate, however, will continue to be a reminder of how invisible forces pattern seemingly random events in the lives of individuals and communities.