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Tidbits - November 14, 2013

Portside
Reader Comments - More on the AFL-CIO; NFL Bullying; Vets and Peace; Seattle Socialists Win; Obamacare; Babies; Announcements - Organizing Walmart & Fast Food Industry - New York - Nov 19; Fighting Back Against Wall St. - NYC - Nov 25; Mark Rogovin To Be Inducted Into the Illinois Labor History Society's Labor Hall of Honor; 'Spies Of Mississippi' preview - NYC - Dec 15; Audio available -The Hidden History of Workplace Resistance: U.S. Autoworkers Speak Out;

Book Review: Capitalism Gone Wild

Michael Hirsch The Indypendent
Review of George Packer's "The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America." This American life is a mess. As responsible as they were for instigating the Great Recession, Wall Street and the securities industry were not the business centers solely at fault for the lead-up to the collapse. An outsized military budget, imperial wars, the decline of unions as counterweights to corporate excesses and the flight of manufacturing overseas played their parts, too.

A Resounding No Vote from Machinists at Boeing

Dominic Gates Seattle Times
Members of the International Association of Machinists have overwhelmingly rejected a contract proposal that would have eliminated their defined benefit pension plan, increased their health insurance costs, and provided wage increases that would have amounted to a pay cut over the contract's eight-year proposed term.

Air Merger

Signe Wilkinson Cartoonist Group

For de Blasio, Contract Talks Offer Problem

Steven Greenhouse The New York Times
New York City Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio and municipal unions have a major problem. After going 4 years without a contract under Mayor Bloomberg the question of a new contract and how much retroactive pay is included is front and center for the incoming Mayor and the municipal unions.

Race, Class, Labor, and the (Not So) Incognito Controversy

By Clarence Lang Labor and Working-Class History Association
The fact that the principals involved in this saga are all elite male athletes engaged in blood sport should not blind us to the fact that everyone, regardless of salient identities, is deserving of safe workspaces.

All in for Inequality for All

By Kathy M. Newman Working-Class Perspectives
Inequality for All might convert a few, but, more importantly, it will give strength to all of us who are on the front lines of reversing income disparity in the U.S. and beyond.