President Karen Lewis at City Club of Chicago

Karen Lewis Chicago Teachers Union
If you say you’re on the freedom side, then that means you will join us in asking the rich to pay their fair share; calling on the city and state to stop the attacks on public and higher education; in asking the banks to end their predatory deals that strip vital dollars from our schools; in fighting for stronger neighborhoods and job creation, and access to health care and not just health insurance.

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Bernie Sanders, Union-Buster

ANDREW MCGILL The Atlantic
More than a dozen local labor organizations have endorsed the Vermont senator, even though their national leaders have picked Hillary Clinton.

Why I’m Ready to Get Arrested With Restaurant Workers

John Cavanagh Inequality.org
From April 11 to 18, I’ll be joining thousands of people from all walks of life – from workers to environmentalists to the just plain angry – who will descend on Capitol Hill in waves to risk arrest and offer a primal scream for democracy.

Labor for Bernie Activists Take the Political Revolution into Their Unions

Rand Wilson and Dan DiMaggio Labor Notes
This is the first time in decades that a national movement of this scale has come together around a candidate with an unapologetic allegiance to working class concerns and aspirations. It’s evident that there’s broad support in unions for Bernie’s platform—and that many members, fed up with their unions’ legacy of “blank check” support for corporate Democrats, want a more inclusive, democratic process for deciding endorsements.

labor

BPS Students Take to the Streets, Mayor Walsh Feeling the Heat

Jason Pramas Dig Boston
What’s unspoken is that the best proof that the unions didn’t have much of a role in the protest is that historically they’ve shown little ability to mobilize significant numbers of students in the Bay State. Typically, union-backed coalitions like BEJA will pull a few dozen to a few hundred people to such protests. Students or non-students, the story is always the same. The people who turn out will be a mix of union and nonprofit staffers.

labor

Tech Workers Should Unionize

Hamilton Nolan Gawker
The fact that your company gives you good free lunches and shuttles to work and nice paycheck does not change the fact that you could get more by negotiating together, as a union. Anyone smart enough to get a job at Google is smart enough to grasp these facts.

labor

How Workers Lose in Negotiations: The ABCs of Corporate Rip-Offs

Carl Finamore Beyond Chron
Aside from the fact that unions seldom use their most powerful weapon, the strike, and aside from the fact that even fewer unions ever mobilize and organize their biggest asset, the members, our biggest problem in bargaining is that labor’s financial analysis of corporations only touches the surface. It misses the vast bulk of corporate hidden wealth. Labor economist Les Leopold explains how companies hide their wealth in his new book, Runaway Inequality.

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How the Birthplace of the American Labor Movement Just Turned on its Unions

Lydia DePillis The Washington Post
Last week, the Republican-controlled legislature in West Virginia overrode a veto by Democratic Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, making the measure officially law. The story of how West Virginia got to that point is a boiled-down version of the changes America has undergone over the past half-century — the pain of de-industrialization, the shift in political power, the casting about for anything that might create jobs.
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