Waterloo was the site of a historic battle for labor rights and racial justice. But as the meatpacking industry changed, the workforce lost its power and was primed for an outbreak. This is how we got here.
Iowa was the last state in the country that permanently took voting rights away from citizens with past convictions unless the government approved individual rights restoration – which now applies only to people with felony homicide convictions.
The families of three workers who died after contracting the coronavirus in an Iowa meat plant outbreak sued Tyson Foods and its top executives Thursday, saying the company knowingly put employees at risk and lied to keep them on the job.
Bernie's staff here says we knocked on 130,000 doors this weekend. I did about 250 of those doors, so do the math: 500 people like me. Possibly I’m just swept up in the moment, but it seems like a great social movement in the making.
Many large labor unions have yet to make formal 2020 presidential endorsements.
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Cathy Glasson is the farthest left candidate in recent memory to mount a serious campaign for Iowa governor. She is betting on a coalition of service workers, many of them immigrants and people of color; members of manufacturing unions, many of them white and some of whom supported Trump; and young members of DSA.
One of the most transparent union-busting provisions of Iowa’s new collective bargaining law has failed to significantly reduce the number of workers covered by the state’s two largest public-sector unions: the Iowa State Education Association and AFSCME Council 61.
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The new law bans public employee unions in most cases from negotiating over issues such as health insurance, evaluation procedures, staff reduction and leaves of absence for political purposes. Police officers and firefighters are exempted from that portion of the law, a move that AFSCME argues in the lawsuit violates the Iowa Constitution by creating "favored" and "disfavored" groups of government workers.
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