Jobs to Move America is pioneering an innovative labor strategy that turns public investments in green infrastructure and manufacturing into opportunities for union organizing and better working conditions.
John Womack’s labor strategy is about workers finding the capacity to "wound capital to make it yield anything.” But the massive challenge in today’s deindustrialized economy is locating where that leverage actually lies.
A deep dig into how the steel industry collapse affected hundreds of thousands of decently paid workers, contrasted with the surge of hospital and nursing home hiring that never matched former pay rates or union protections afforded steel workers.
We should, of course, avoid simplistic nostalgia for industrial work, nor should we forget its dangers and adverse health effects. Yet workers are right to remember and value many aspects of industrial employment.
Reading Thomas Frank's new book, Listen, Liberal, or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, I was reminded of the snapshot that Oxfam offered us early this year: 62 billionaires now have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the global population, while the richest 1% own more than the other 99% combined...In 2010, it took 388 of the super-rich to equal the holdings of that bottom 50%. At this rate...by 2030, just the top 10 billionaires might do the trick. [*]
The New York Times reported in 2014 new immigrants are more often to be found in midsize cities, like Dayton, Ohio than in New York, Chicago, and other large cities. Like Youngstown, Dayton had lost over 40% of its population. But city officials embraced immigration by establishing a Welcoming Dayton plan in 2011. New immigrants and refugees were encouraged to relocate in this community and developed support groups to help newcomers adjust to their new community.
Gregg Shotwell is a retired UAW member who frequently contributes poems to the Blue Collar Review, and is the author of Autoworkers Under the Gun (Haymarket Press, 2012).
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