Skip to main content

Tidbits - October 6, 2016 - Reader Comments: UE Calls for Trump Defeat; Fact Checking Pence; Israel Seizes Women's Boat to Gaza; Women of Salt of the Earth; New York's Muslim Communities; and more...

Portside
Reader Comments: UE Calls for Trump Defeat; Fact Checking Pence; Israel Seizes Women's Boat to Gaza and 13 dangerous women - What you can do; Who to Vote For-Lessons from the Past for Leftists; Prison Strike Continues-Now Joined by Alabama Prison Guards; Reader query - why did you use certain sources in your labor post?; Cubs and Socialism; Public Option; The Women of Salt of the Earth; Announcements: Labor and Islam; NYPD Surveillance of New York's Muslim Communities

A Union Is Brewing at Virginia Lipton Factory

Chris Brooks Labor Notes
Lipton brings tea from around the world through the Port of Virginia. At its single 20-acre plant in nearby Suffolk, 200 workers roast, blend, package, and warehouse it, producing over 6 billion bags a year. For years on end, these workers have been “drafted”—the company’s term for forced overtime—into working 13 straight days out of every 14.

Jobs, Justice, and the Clean-Energy Future

Jeremy Brecher Dollars & Sense
The Clean Energy Future will provide many new jobs for each that is lost. There will, however, be fewer jobs in coal, oil, and gas extraction and burning and in nuclear energy. For example, there will be about 100,000 fewer jobs each year in mining and extraction compared to the business-as-usual scenario. The report calls for a "just transition" for the workers who hold those jobs, including "assistance in training and placement in new jobs, or retirement with dignity."

This Day in Labor History: September 16, 2004

Erik Loomis Lawyers, Guns and Money
On September 16, 2004, Mt. Olive Pickles finally came to an agreement with the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, ending a lengthy boycott of the company. This groundbreaking farm workers union launched one of the most successful organizing campaigns of the last 25 years in the South and demonstrate the continued vitality of farmworker unions in the present. FLOC was successful with these workers because they became a way for workers to express their own power.

Domestic Workers in Ill. Win Bill of Rights: “Years of Organizing Have Finally Paid Off”

Parker Asmann In These Times
Worldwide, 90 percent of domestic workers—the vast majority of whom are women—do not have access to any kind of social security coverage, according to the International Labour Organization. In the United States, an estimated 95 percent of domestic workers are female, foreign born and/ or persons of color. They frequently lack protections and face near constant adversity.

labor

Labor Must Take on Capital

Saqib Bhatti and Stephen Lerner Convergence
Unions must expand beyond narrow bargaining to challenge those who hold wealth and power at the highest levels. Most unions are accustomed to bargaining with their direct employers, as they have done for decades. But the financialization of the economy has rendered that structure obsolete. In order to win for workers, unions need to take their demands directly to those who actually have the money and control. They can often be found on Wall Street.

Labor Supports #BlacksLivesMatter; Call on Police Unions for Accountability

Richard Trumka; Tefere Gebre; JWJSF; Left Labor Project
AFL-CIO leaders have reached out to union members in support of actions that can be taken to stop and prevent police killings of people of color. Racism plays an insidious role in the daily lives of all working people of color. This is a labor issue because it is a workplace issue; it is a community issue, and unions are the community. Philando Castile was a union member, and so his family is our family. Ideas of what you can do from labor activists.
Subscribe to Labor