Portside

Norman Rogers, an employee of a southern California refinery and second vice president of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 675, discusses how unions must engage in climate change policy decisions to protect the planet and leave no worker behind.

Labor unions ranging across several types of frontline workers today joined environmental groups in a lawsuit against the federal government.

2,000 USW copper miners, on strike at 5 ASARCO plants in Texas and Arizona, have not been paid for over a month. Union members and the community have come together to donate food, ensuring every striker is able to have a Thanksgiving meal.

I learned two important lessons when young. One was that the company would do nothing for the workers unless forced by collective action. The other was that labor unions were instruments of both economic and social justice.

Nationally, at all workplaces, one employee is killed on the job every other hour. Twelve a day. These are not all accidents. Too many are foreseeable, preventable, avoidable tragedies. With the approach of April 28, Workers Memorial Day 2017, the USW is seeking in America what workers in Canada have to prevent these deaths. That is a law holding supervisors and corporate officials criminally accountable and exacting serious prison sentences when workers die on the job.

Unions must maintain unity among the workforce split by the Carrier deal, and educate its members on why they should not have voted for Trump. Election data seems to indicate that it was union white workers more than poor white workers who supported Trump to begin with. The divide between highly skilled and paid workers and minimum wage workers harkens back to the 1920s when unions focused primarily on craft workers rather than the expanding industrial workforce.

Whether you’re expecting a strike or lockout, the steps are similar—and there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Union-busting law firms pass around the same employer playbook. Our side has rich experience in preparation. Ask for advice and help from combatants who’ve been through a strike or a lockout and emerged victorious.

Rich countries make money by owning things – physical and intellectual property – and setting global standards the rest of the world must adhere to. This also means an economic shift within these countries, away from well-paid, secure, skilled jobs in industry to a precarious, service-based economy.

Lawmakers must stop functioning as handmaidens to the rich in an economic scheme that has failed the 99 percent from the very day the 1 percent got Ronald Reagan to buy it.

New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority refused to change its plans to spend $34 million on Chinese steel to repair the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.