Unions must either demand a place at the table or be part of the meal
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Two new books shed light on the sustained union-busting campaigns that bookended that all-too brief period of labor-management détente. Chad Pearson’s Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement, and Lane Windham's Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970’s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide.
Based on my experience as an organizer for the Tennessee Education Association (TEA), it is clear that jettisoning exclusive representation might have solved the free-rider problem for the union, but it exacerbated the divide-and-conquer problem.
Republicans in Virginia have proposed a referendum in November to strengthen the state's existing open shop laws. In this, an opportunity presents itself that labor unions must take. Our goal should not simply be to defeat the proposal: it should be a realignment of the conversation surrounding the role in labor unions in Virginia’s—and America’s—political economy.
Portside's posts did not go out as scheduled Saturday and Sunday. Our service provider, May First, upgraded all of their servers Saturday, to prevent coordinated hacking and DOS - Denial of Service attacks. Unfortunately there were conflicts between the new server software and the software that Portside uses to send posts. We have identified the problem, and are now working to correct it. Below is an Index of the posts that were posted to our website over the weekend.
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