General strike in Spain
3.29.2012 Leave a comment
Spanish Workers, Students Mass in General Strike | Common Dreams.
Organized labor tacks to the right
2.20.2012 Leave a comment
Samuel Gompers
Matea Gold and Melanie Mason of the Los Angeles Times briefly described this rightward shift in big labor:
Last May, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka stood a few blocks from the White House and issued a stern warning: Union members could not be counted on as the Democrats’ foot soldiers anymore.
“If leaders aren’t blocking the wrecking ball and advancing working families’ interests, then working people will not support them,” he said in a speech at the National Press Club.
Flash forward to today: Labor appears squarely back in the Democrats’ corner for the 2012 election — pushed there in large part by Republican attacks on collective bargaining rights for public employees.
Those and other anti-union measures are rallying organized labor to the side of its longtime Democratic allies, and not just in states such as Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan, where they are battling efforts aimed at curbing union organizing.
The country’s biggest unions also have played a central role in helping a network of federal pro-Democratic “super PACs” get off the ground, pouring more than $4 million into those groups in 2011, even as many wealthy liberals kept their checkbooks closed.
And some major labor groups have even inserted themselves into the Republican presidential primaries with ads that take aim at White House hopeful Mitt Romney.
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Some Verizon workers are now on strike
8.7.2011 Leave a comment
At issue in this dispute: The concessions-laden contract Verizon wants the striking Communication Workers of America to accept. The Associated Press reports that:
Forty-five thousand Verizon Communications Inc. workers from Massachusetts to Washington, D.C., went on strike Sunday after negotiations fizzled over a new labor contract for more than a fifth of the company’s work force.
Verizon is the nation’s largest wireless carrier, but the contract that expired at midnight Saturday covers workers in the company’s wireline division, which includes local-phone operations, services for businesses and governments and long-haul wholesale traffic.
Talks in Philadelphia and New York stalled Saturday night after Verizon continued to demand more than 100 concessions from workers regarding health care, pensions and work rules, said the Communications Workers of America.
Mark C. Reed, Verizon’s executive vice president of human resources, called the outcome of the unions’ actions “regrettable” for customers and employees.
“We will continue to do our part to reach a new contract that reflects today’s economic realities in our wireline business and addresses the needs of all parties,” he said in a statement.
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- 35000 Verizon workers could strike over contract – BusinessWeek (news.google.com)
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- Thousands go on strike at Verizon (bbc.co.uk)
- 45K Verizon Workers Strike Over New Labor Contract (abcnews.go.com)
All Tied Up and Nowhere to Go by Stephen Zielinski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
All Tied Up and Nowhere to Go 