Kentucky

How Appalachian Towns Are Learning To Help Each Other After Floods

March 15, 2025 Katie Myers, Next City. Create! Appalachia, climate crisis, Disaster Recovery, Flooding, Kentucky

When the rivers and creeks running through eastern Kentucky jumped their banks and flooded a wide swath of the region for the second time in as many years, Cara Ellis set to work. One week later, she’s hardly let up. Ellis has spent countless hours helping friends in her hometown of Pikeville evacuate and delivering supplies to people who have lost their homes. “I’ve been here, there, everywhere in the county,” she said. “It’s overwhelming. There’s been a lot of devastation.” Ellis spoke during a brief moment of rest in the chaos. Her home was spared when storms brought torrential rain to central Appalachia during the weekend of February 15.

Kentucky Activists Bought Land Where Feds Want To Build A Prison

February 16, 2025 Jared Bennett, Louisville Public Media. Resist! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Kentucky, Land Reform, Victory

A community building and land restoration group bought a plot of Letcher County land that’s been targeted for a new federal prison. The Appalachian Rekindling Project paid local property owners $160,000 in late December for 63 acres near the community of Roxana, according to a deed of sale obtained by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting. The land makes up a portion of the 500-acre site where the Bureau of Prisons planned to build an estimated $500 million prison complex to incarcerate more than 1,300 people.

The Arts Organization Helping Transform Appalachia’s Craft Economy

January 13, 2025 Kristi Eaton, Resilience. Create! Appalachia, Arts, Hurricane Helene, Kentucky, Small Businesses

Makers United supports historically marginalized makers in the craft economy by removing the barriers to accessing business development resources and e-commerce opportunities they need to grow their small businesses. In 2023, that commitment led Nest to expand Makers United to Appalachia, starting with 54 counties in eastern Kentucky, where they identified not only the need for economic investment but recognized the potential for growth in the craft sector, especially in rural and digitally disconnected communities. As a result, the program delivers one-of-a-kind support by working with local and regional efforts to improve makers’ e-commerce readiness and enhance their business’ e-commerce performance to help folk artists market and distribute their work.

Kentucky Battery Plant Workers Launch Union Drive With UAW

November 23, 2024 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. Organize! Kentucky, Unions, United Auto Workers (UAW), Worker Rights and Jobs

A majority of the 1,000 auto workers at the car battery park Blue Oval in Glendale, Kentucky, have signed union cards to join the United Auto Workers. The battery park, a joint venture between Ford and South Korea’s SK On, is expected to ramp up hiring to 5,000 hourly workers by 2030. It has twin battery plants. But the second one is on hold due low demand for electric vehicles. At the first plant, workers are testing battery module packs from facilities in Georgia, as the plant prepares to become fully operational next year. Since he started last year, Chad Johnson has seen co-workers suffer mild heart attacks and respiratory problems, apparently from exposure to chemicals.

Mutual Aid Groups Mobilize In Wake Of Hurricane Helene

October 4, 2024 It's Going Down, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Organize! climate crisis, disaster relief, Florida, Food Not Bombs, Hurricane Helene, Kentucky, Mutual Aid, Natural Disasters, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia

A Category 4 storm, Hurricane Helene, one of the largest storms to hit the Gulf Coast in a century, collided into the Big Bend area of Northern Florida on Thursday, before moving into neighboring states of Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and the Carolinas. According to media reports, upwards of 60 people have already been confirmed dead, although the death toll is expected to rise as many municipalities have yet to release official numbers as cell phone service and internet remains down and millions are currently without power. Extreme flooding has been reported in Atlanta, GA and Asheville, NC, as whole communities are left stranded and lacking proper shelter and access to clean drinking water.

2023, A Year Of Progress: Expanding Voting Rights Across The Country

December 31, 2023 Morgan McLeod, The Sentencing Project. Organize! Elections, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, New Years Eve, Pennsylvania, Prisoner rights, Texas, Virginia, Voting, Voting Rights

This year, thanks to the tireless efforts of dedicated advocates and organizations, we’re witnessing a remarkable shift in the political landscape when it comes to expanding and protecting the right to vote for justice-impacted people. Advocacy Based on Lived Experience (ABLE) – an organization dedicated to working to engage people in the democratic process – held several community events across Kentucky, allowing attendees and lawmakers to hold discussions on pertinent issues in their communities, regardless of their political affiliation. Participants frequently discussed state legislation that would restore the right to vote to over 160,000 Kentuckians who are disenfranchised due to their history with the criminal legal system.

Healthcare Choices Narrow For Kentuckians In Medicare Advantage

October 26, 2023 Deborah Yetter, Kentucky Lantern. Educate! Kentucky, Medicare Advantage, Privatization, Retirees, Seniors

Louisville - With open enrollment underway, older Americans are getting barraged with television ads, mailings and online notices hawking a variety of Medicare Advantage plans for health coverage. But many Kentuckians, including thousands of state retirees, are largely captive customers with such plans selected by their employer as part of health coverage promised for those 65 or older — an increasingly popular means to cover retirees. And members of such plans may have fewer choices for care because of ongoing contract disputes between Baptist Health and three national companies that offer Medicare Advantage plans in Kentucky including Louisville-based Humana, which covers most state retirees.

Auto Workers Escalate: Surprise Strike At Massive Ford Truck Plant

October 12, 2023 Keith Brower Brown, Labor Notes. Resist! Auto Workers, Ford, Kentucky, Stand Up Strike, Strikes, Unions, United Auto Workers (UAW), Worker Rights and Jobs

Every Friday for the past four weeks, Big 3 CEOs have waited fearfully for Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain to announce which plants will strike next. But without warning on Wednesday afternoon, the union threw a haymaker: within 10 minutes the UAW would be shutting down the vast Kentucky Truck Plant. This plant, on 500 acres outside Louisville, is one of Ford’s most profitable—cranking out full-size SUVs and the Superduty line of commercial trucks. “We make almost half of Ford’s U.S. revenue right here,” says James White, who has worked in the plant for a decade. These 8,700 strikers join the 25,000 already walking the lines at assembly plants and parts distribution centers across the country in the union’s escalating Stand-Up Strike.

Kentucky Auto Workers At Ford Are Preparing For A Strike

August 29, 2023 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. Resist! Auto Workers, Ford, Kentucky, Strikes, Worker Rights and Jobs

Five hundred Auto Workers (UAW) from Local 862 held rallies in Louisville, Kentucky, August 24 and 25, part of a wave of practice pickets and rallies around the country. Class struggle was on everyone’s lips. A variety of issues brought them to the picket, but the auto workers there were unanimous about turbocharged wealth inequality leaving workers behind. At the Thursday picket, Local 862 member Aaron Webster said he’s grown tired of feeling squeezed, describing the contract fight as a fight between the rich and the poor. Webster started working at the Kentucky Truck Plant in 2014 building Ford Super Duty Trucks, Ford Expeditions, and Lincoln Navigators.

Louisville’s Black Neighborhoods Want To End Publicly-Funded Displacement

August 8, 2023 Oscar Perry Abello, Next City. Create! Black America, Displacement, Gentrification, Housing, Kentucky, Louisville

Jessica Bellamy wants to stop paying almost a thousand dollars a year to help displace the community that shaped her as a child: Louisville’s historically-Black Smoketown neighborhood. That’s the current property tax bill for the camelback shotgun house her grandmother gifted her a few years ago. It’s the house where Bellamy spent part of her childhood, just steps from her grandmother’s soul food restaurant, Shirley Mae’s Cafe. The restaurant, where Bellamy often took orders and served drinks over the years, is still hanging on as a neighborhood landmark. But like so many other homes in the redlined neighborhood, the house had gradually fallen into an unlivable state of disrepair.

Amazon Workers Take Effort To Unionize Largest Air Hub National

March 19, 2023 Quinlan Bentley and Jolene Almendarez, Cincinnati Enquirer. Organize! Amazon, Kentucky, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

The effort to unionize workers at the largest Amazon Air Hub in the world is going national. Local organizers with Unionize Amazon Northern Kentucky KCVG announced Saturday that they're joining forces with the national Amazon Labor Union, which unionized a Staten Island facility last year. They're also beginning to collect union authorization cards, which include signatures from employees confirming they want to take the issue to a vote. At least three dozen volunteers and members of the public rallied outside of the air hub Saturday afternoon, chanting and waiving signs with the workers' demands: a $30-an-hour starting wage, 180 hours of paid time off annually with no cap on accrued time and union representation against discipline.

Underpaid And Insulted, Maximus Call Center Workers Organize

March 16, 2023 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. Resist! Kentucky, Labor Unions, Louisiana, Mississippi, Strikes, Virginia, Worker Rights and Jobs

Their effort to unionize really got underway in 2018 when thousands of workers came forward to allege wage theft totaling $100 million. Eventually the Department of Labor found wage and hour violations affecting 2,224 workers. The federal contractor at the time, General Dynamics Information Technology, agreed to pay $553,131 in back wages, according to a CWA spokesperson. Maximus bought the company out in November 2018. But despite the hefty settlement, the organizing began to fizzle because of high turnover. Then last year, workers walked off the job in Louisiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Virginia in March, May, and November, demanding voluntary recognition of their union and higher pay.

Multiracial Tenant Union At The Forefront Of A Growing Movement

March 11, 2023 Fran Quigley, Waging Nonviolence. Strategize! Housing, Kentucky, Louisville, Tenant Union

Louisville, Kentucky - Private police officers guide a line of late-model SUVs through the January morning’s cold rain into a lane of Louisville’s Grinstead Avenue, specially cleared to ease their path to the entrance of Collegiate School. Brake lights shine through the gloom as children in plaid uniforms climb out and head inside. Collegiate, founded by a plantation-owning Kentucky family and led by a board president who is the heir to the Brown-Forman liquor dynasty, has an annual tuition of $26,000 per year. Just to the west of a new, modern Collegiate playground is the Yorktown Apartments, separated from school grounds by a chain link fence topped with barbed wire.

Flooding Increasingly Pummels The Southeast; Organizers Fight Back

March 6, 2023 Cameron Oglesby, Next City. Organize! climate crisis, Flooding, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, Texas

Beverly May, retired nurse practitioner and current epidemiologist at the University of Kentucky, lives maybe 100 feet from the house she grew up in Floyd County, Kentucky. She characterizes her community as “hillbilly country,” an area in central Appalachia that once served as a critical cog in the coal industry’s wheel. When historic floods ravaged the area in late July 2022, May decided to trade in her medical work for flood research and activism with the nonprofit community well-being organization Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. “I’ve lived here all my life, and I could not believe it when I saw helicopters going out to rescue people,” she says. “Never has there been this many deaths.”

Why Louisville Trader Joe’s Employees Voted To Unionize

January 31, 2023 Ana Rocio Alvarez Brinez, Portside. Organize! Food and Agriculture, Food Workers, Kentucky, Louisville, Trader Joe’s, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Louisville, Kentucky - Employees at the only Trader Joe's store in Louisville voted in favor of organizing Thursday evening, becoming the third location of the national grocery chain to form a union. The store's workers will now be a part of the Trader Joe's United, the guild for employees across the country. The employees who voted in favor of unionizing won their vote 48-36, a release said, after taking action to do so in September. "We are so excited to be the first Trader Joe’s location affiliated with Trader Joe’s United in the south. It’s a game changing decision that will contribute massively to the modern labor movement," Connor Hovey, an employee of the store and union organizer, told The Courier Journal. A request for comment sent to Trader Joe's corporate Thursday night was not immediately returned.

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