Portside

As many as 400 workers at more than 60 fast food restaurants in the Detroit metro area walked off the job on Friday. The fast food strike in Detroit is the second major labor action to hit an American city’s fast food industry this week: On Wednesday and Thursday, more than 100 workers in St. Louis walked off the job at roughly 30 different restaurants. These rolling walkouts followed similar actions in New York, central Pennsylvania, and Chicago.

The ongoing organizational renewal and substantial growth of UE is one of the most remarkable stories in the U.S. labor movement in decades. Of the 42 unions who comprised the founding roster of the CIO in 1938 only eight survive intact today.

An interview with Faye Guenther, president of UFCW Local 3000.

“We are concerned at the appearance of targeting publicly pro-union worker leaders,” said a union official about a raid in western New York.

The president has gone nuclear against federal union jobs — historically African Americans’ ladder to economic equality.

The contract is the CTU’s first without a strike or a strike vote in 15 years. The agreement sets lower class size limits, gives pay raises and could add hundreds of new staff members.