Portside

Despite the opposition of many Bay Area workers and their unions are to fracking they are finding, much to their dismay, that their pension funds are being invested in the fossil fuel industry.

The longtime New York Times labor reporter on the state of the American labor movement and labor journalism.

“[Right-to-work] is going to bring everybody down,” said Russ Krings, the directing business representative for the Milwaukee union International Association of Machinists District 10, during a press conference with other labor leaders on Monday. “It’s going to affect not only the union families and nonunion families. It’s going to affect all the businesses that we go and spend our money at. This is going to bring the economy down."

Because their traditional allies from the Democratic Party have obsessively embraced corporate-motivated innovations, teacher unions seem paralyzed, unable to respond with a new strategy. They criticize the overuse of standardized tests, but they keep electing Democrats to office who, once elected, more often than not join the corporate attack on education.

In this article Kristof acknowledges he was wrong about unions - As unions wane in American life, it’s also increasingly clear that they were doing a lot of good in sustaining middle class life — especially the private-sector unions that are now dwindling. "To understand the rising inequality, you have to understand the devastation in the labor movement,” says Jake Rosenfeld, a labor expert at the University of Washington and the author of “What Unions No Longer Do.”

IATSE is taking on Live Nation, the nation's biggest concert promoter because of its use of labor contractors who pay low wages and fail to ensure workplace safety standards. The union argues that the promoter, not the subcontractor is responsible,workers conditions -- an argument consistent with the NLRB ruling that McDonald's not its franchises were responsible for the conditions.

Republican Governor Bruce Raynor launches ferocious attack on organized labor in Illinois. The Governor has aimed his attack against both public and private sector workers. This goes beyond Wisconsin Governor Walker whose attack was mainly aimed at public sector employees.

The bloody history of mine workers in West Virginia is truly as dark as any dungeon, but the recent indictment of a mine owner suggests that maybe the tide has turned.

Karen Friedman, executive vice president and policy director at the nonprofit Pension Rights Center in Washington, is highly critical of the new law while acknowledging that pension reforms are needed. “We are not saying don’t fix multiemployer [plans],” Friedman said. But an act that allows plans to cut retiree pensions is “such a departure from current law,” she said. “It’s just such a buzz saw on retiree pensions.”

There is nothing new about Republican opposition to teachers unions, but in recent years, it has become increasingly clear that some Democrats have turned against them as well. In the following post we hear from a union leader, Bob Peterson, the president of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, about how he thinks teachers union must change to keep alive public education.