Portside

Puget Sound workers are latest to join the strike wave, with weeks to go before a Black Friday showdown

In protest of paltry hours and defiance of firings, over 80 Wal-Mart workers in Hialeah, Florida walk off the job

Sociologist Theda Skocpol tells what drives the angry right -- and what comes after the government shutdown. The Right in this country, over the last half century, has recognized that fighting across many localities and states is worth it. And they've developed mechanisms for doing that, and that turned out to have a big payoff in Congress. The real problem that you've got right now on the Left is how to defeat this stuff, how to contain it, how to beat it.

Cleaning and concessions workers in federal buildings will protest their taxpayer-funded poverty jobs. Those planning to strike include workers who serve food or wash floors at Union Station (owned by the Department of Transportation), Smithsonian Museums (owned by the federal Smithsonian Institution), and the Ronald Reagan Building and Old Post Office (owned by the General Services Administration).

“It’s a real live class war we find ourselves in as we meet here,” LA County Federation of Labor Executive Secretary-Treasurer Maria Elena Durazo told delegates from the fifty-seven unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO. Noting the corporations and Koch brothers arrayed against organized labor, Durazo paraphrased boxer Mike Tyson: “Everybody’s got a plan until I hit ‘em in the face.”

In twelve weeks, on the busiest shopping day of the year, Walmart workers will mount what may be the biggest-ever US strike against the retail giant

Walmart workers and supporters plan to mount protests in fifteen cities Thursday, a mobilization that the union-backed group OUR Walmart expects will be its largest since last November’s Black Friday strike.

Sixteen congressional Democrats criticized the Walmart discipline, urging CEO Mike Duke “to stop all retaliatory actions against employees engaged in protests regarding Walmart’s labor policies.”

The AFL-CIO is discussing “the next stage” in alternate formations and there “will be some limited, thoughtful experiments in different places through various affiliates.” The AFL-CIO also plans to support an ambitious multi-union effort to organize in Texas. “The AFT has come to us and said, ‘We want you to convene other unions to make a long-term investment in Texas and we’re going to do it.”

Service Employees International Union President Mary Kay Henry believes fast food workers will massively increase their campaign within a few weeks.