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Unchecked Corporate Power

Economic Policy Institute
Forced arbitration, the enforcement crisis, and how workers are fighting back

Unionizing the World’s Largest Slaughterhouse

Russell Hall Monthly Review
How meatpacking workers successfully established a union at the Tar Heel slaughterhouse in North Carolina. The success of the workers there in unionizing provides important lessons for future unionization efforts.

Controversial Settlement Divides New York Nurses

Chris Brooks Labor Notes
After a strike threat and a contentious ratification vote, 13,000 members of the New York State Nurses Association settled a contract that achieved gains but fell short of the union’s goal of winning safe nurse-to-patient staffing ratios.

U.S. Labor Board: Graduate Students at Private Colleges Can Unionize

Robert Iafolla Reuters
The National Labor Relations Board's decision on Columbia University graduate students seeking to unionize only applies to private colleges. Organizing rights for graduate students at public colleges depend on each state's labor laws. Graduate students have formed unions in more than a dozen states.

Socialism in America

Harold Meyerson Dissent Magazine
The upsurge in interest in the ideas of Socialism also means a reassessment of its traditions. Jack Ross offers a new, ambitious attempt to come to terms with the history of the Socialist Party in the United States, an organization, and movement, whose story is one of this country's modern legends. In this review, Harold Meyerson, who, as he points out, was a part of this history, takes a look.

Temp Organizing Gets Big Boost from NLRB

Harris Freeman and George Gonos Labor Notes
The new joint-employer standard provides a much more favorable legal framework for workers to form unions at temped-out warehouses, manufacturing and food processing plants, recycling facilities, hotels, and franchised janitorial services and fast food outlets.

No Need to Build The Donald's Wall, It’s Built

Todd Miller TomDispatch
Although wall construction began during Bill Clinton’s administration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) built most of the approximately 700 miles of fencing after the Secure Fence Act of 2006 was passed. The 2006 wall-building project was expected to be so environmentally destructive that homeland security chief Michael Chertoff waived 37 environmental and cultural laws in the name of national security.