Labor

The Climate Movement Needs To Move Beyond ‘Big Tent’

September 14, 2015 Cam Fenton, www.wagingnonviolence.org Strategize! Canada, Climate Change, Environment, Labor

By Cam Fenton in Waging Non-Violence - Earlier this summer I helped to organize the March for Jobs, Justice & the Climate — an action that brought more than 10,000 people to the streets of Toronto in one of the largest and most diverse climate mobilizations in Canadian history. More than 100 organizations supported the march — from national environmental groups to labor unions to the indigenous rights’ movement Idle No More to Toronto-based groups tackling poverty, food justice and migration. It was, as Naomi Klein put it, the “first steps of a new kind of climate movement” that reached beyond the traditional boundaries of the environmental movement. The march was a “big tent” approach to climate organizing being put to practice, the same approach that helped the People’s Climate March bring over 400,000 people to the streets of New York City last September.

How To ‘Change Everything’ W/o Pitting Workers Against Planet?

September 9, 2015 Alexandra Bradbury, www.labornotes.org Strategize! Climate Change, Labor, Worker Rights and Jobs

By Alexandra Bradbury in Labor Notes - As fights erupted in the Pacific Northwest this summer over fuel export terminals and Arctic drilling, the idea of a just transition has been on my mind. The late Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers (now part of the Steelworkers) coined the term. A “just transition” away from fossil fuels wouldn’t pit workers against the planet. Those displaced should be able to count on decent new green jobs and retraining. “There’s a Superfund for dirt,” Mazzocchi used to say. “There ought to be one for workers.” As Shell Oil’s drilling rig and ice cutter churned toward the Arctic, activists in Seattle and Portland, paddling kayaks and dangling from cables, tried to block them. Some unions backed the protests, but not the usually progressive Longshore Workers (ILWU).

After Labor Day, Dig In For The Fight Ahead

September 9, 2015 Sarita Gupta, www.talkpoverty.org Resist! Labor, Worker Rights and Jobs

By Sarita Gupta in Talk Poverty - Between cookouts and last outings to the pool, Labor Day weekend provided all of us a chance to celebrate the end of summer. But Labor Day should also be cause for celebration of another kind: the very reason that we have weekends off, for example. As we take stock after Labor Day, there’s much that we have accomplished, much to be grateful for, and yet so much work remains if we are to create a path to economic stability for all of us. This Labor Day, nearly a quarter of Americans who work in the private sector couldn’t spend time with their families because they don’t have access to paid holiday time. This is just one symptom of an economic system that is out of whack—so much so that people working full-time, or two or even three jobs, can’t make ends meet.

The Making Of The American Police State

July 30, 2015 Christian Parenti, www.informationclearinghouse.info Educate! History, Labor, police brutality, Police State, Racial Justice

By Christian Parenti in Information Clearinghouse - How did we get here? The numbers are chilling: 2.2 million people behind bars, another 4.7 million on parole or probation. Even small-town cops are armed like soldiers, with a thoroughly militarized southern border. The common leftist explanation for this is “the prison-industrial complex,” suggesting that the buildup is largely privatized and has been driven by parasitic corporate lobbying. But the facts don’t support an economistic explanation. Private prisons only control 8 percent of prison beds. Nor do for-profit corporations use much prison labor. Nor even are guards’ unions, though strong in a few important states, driving the buildup. The vast majority of the American police state remains firmly within the public sector.

12 Corporations Benefit From Prison Industrial Complex

July 7, 2015 Rick Riley, www.atlantablackstar.com Educate! Capitalism, Finance and the Economy, Labor, Mass Incarceration, Prison

By Rick Riley in Atlanta Black Star - According to the Left Business Observer, “the federal prison industry produces 100 percent of all military helmets, war supplies and other equipment. The workers supply 98 percent of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93 percent of paints and paintbrushes; 92 percent of stove assembly; 46 percent of body armor; 36 percent of home appliances; 30 percent of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21 percent of office furniture. Airplane parts, medical supplies and much more: prisoners are even raising seeing-eye dogs for blind people.” With all of that productivity, the inmates make about 90 cents to $4 a day. Here are some of the biggest corporations to use such practices, but there are hundreds more. . .

New Study Points To A New Normal: Job Insecurity

May 26, 2015 Ella Bedard, www.rabble.ca Educate! Canada, Inequality, Labor, Worker Rights and Jobs

A new study released today confirms the broad ranging consequences of precarious labour in urban areas of southern Ontario. In 2013, PEPSO, a research partnership between United Way Toronto and McMaster University conducted a major study on precarious labour in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton areas. Using data collected from a survey of over 4,000 workers and 28 in-depth interviews, The Precarity Penalty, released today, builds on those findings. "The first study generated some questions that we wanted to look at in more detail," said Wayne Lewchuk, co-author of the report and Professor at McMaster University's School of Labour Studies and Department of Economics. He explained that revisiting the study three years later has allowed PEPSO researchers to take note of some changing trends within the labour force, and to address some of the issues that came up in their earlier study more thoroughly, such as discrimination, access to child care, and job training.

Tufts Students Stage ‘Indefinite’ Hunger Strike Against Janitor Layoffs

May 6, 2015 Rachel Luban, www.inthesetimes.com Resist! Higher Education, Labor, Student Activism, Worker Rights and Jobs

Tufts University students launched a hunger strike and took over a quad next to the Medford/Somerville campus’s main administrative building Sunday to protest planned layoffs of 35 janitors. Five undergraduates joined the “indefinite” hunger strike as a show of solidarity with the janitors, 17 percent of whom are slated to lose their jobs. Dozens more students set up tents on a quad they plan to occupy day and night until the cuts are halted. Adelaida Colon, a custodian at Tufts for the past 18 years, doesn’t know what she’d do if she lost her job. “It would affect me immensely,” she says. Her husband is disabled and hasn’t been able to work for 12 years, making her the breadwinner. “He depends on me, because his income is very small, $800 a month.”

Vermont Union Members Face Multiple Attacks By Governor

April 23, 2015 Steve Early, www.popularresistance.org Educate! health, Labor, Worker Rights and Jobs

Vermont - Liz Nikazmerad is a rarity in American labor: a local union president under the age of 30, displaying both youth and militancy. For the last two year years, she has led the 180-member Local 203 of the United Electrical Workers (UE), while working in the produce department of City Market in Burlington, Vermont. Thanks to their contract bargaining, full-time and part-time employees of this bustling community-owned food cooperative currently enjoy good medical benefits. But that wasn’t always the case in Nikazmerad’s past non-union jobs, nor is it any assurance that UE members won’t be forced to pay more for their health care in the future. To curb medical cost inflation and related cost-shifting to workers, the UE has long advocated that private insurance plans be replaced with publicly funded universal coverage.

Holding Companies That Use Sweatshop Labor Accountable

April 14, 2015 Erik Loomis, www.inthesetimes.com Create! Labor, Sweatshop, Workers Rights and Jobs

We as labor activists must begin to think about how to build international labor solidarity by fighting for legislation that would create this accountability—specifically giving workers around the world the right to sue in American courts if companies or their subcontractors violated basic labor rights such as workplace violence, avoiding paying a nation’s minimum wage, or pollution discharges that sicken and kill people. Despite recent Supreme Court decisions reducing the power of international agencies to sue in U.S. courts under the Alien Tort Statute of 1789, empowering workers to demand accountability through this law is our best bet to working toward better labor conditions worldwide. This law gives foreigners the right to sue if they have suffered from actions “in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.”

Why Workers Won’t Unite

April 6, 2015 Kim Phillips-Fein, www.theatlantic.com Strategize! History, Labor, Occupy, Workers Rights and Jobs

The Ludlow strikers, were they able to time-travel to Lower Manhattan in 2011, would have found much that seemed familiar, starting with the statistics about economic inequality: the richest 1 percent of the nation controls 40 percent of the wealth and earns 20 percent of the national income, proportions similar to those in the early 20th century (and up from about 25 percent and 9 percent, respectively, in the 1970s). The miners would have recognized, too, the anger about widespread unemployment, the spectacle of lavish upper-crust consumption, and the increasing influence of private money in politics. But they might well have wondered: Where are the unions? Even though it got some support from labor groups, Occupy Wall Street was more directly focused on unemployment, student-loan and consumer debt, and the generous terms of the 2008 bailout for the financial sector than on specific issues related to working conditions.

A “Grand Alliance” To Save Our Public Postal Service

February 17, 2015 Dave Johnson, www.ourfuture.org Organize! Labor, Postal Service, Privatization

Republicans created the problems with the Postal Service. In 2006 Republicans in Congress required it to come up with $5.5 billion per year to pre-fund 75 years of retiree costs. This means the Postal Service has to set aside money now for employees who are not even born yet. No other government agency – and certainly no company – has to do this. They also require the Postal Service to make a profit – or at least break even. But democratic government is supposed to provide services to We the People. It is notsupposed to be about making a profit off of us. Yet Republicans say government should be “run like a business.” Then they hamstring it, preventing it from competing with businesses because they say it has too many advantages and any competition would be unfair.

How Can Labor End Its Death Spiral?

January 25, 2015 Staff, /www.laborfightback.or Strategize! Labor, Labor Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

The attacks on labor and workers cannot be sugar coated. It is a crisis of the highest order. This is no time for complacency or an attitude of resignation to additional defeats. The employers' campaign has been a record of relatively easy victories, and it is high time for changes in labor's strategy in order to bring the corporate class to heel. We have to say "No to Austerity Measures!" imposed on the working class while the high rollers laugh all the way to the bank. The alternative strategy, which we in the Labor Fightback Network have urged since our inception, is for labor and our community allies to run our own candidates for pubic office, based on a program that reflects the needs of the great majority of the population, with candidates we put forward accountable to their base. So long as we continue to depend on either of the two corporate parties to overcome the crisis that the labor movement is up against, more defeats loom in our future. It's time for a change!

In US, There Are Twice As Many Solar Workers As Coal Miners

January 20, 2015 Kirsten Korosec, www.readersupportednews.org Educate! Energy, Environment, Labor, Solar Energy

SolarCity, the largest installer of residential solar systems in the U.S., nearly doubled its workforce last year, hiring 4,000 people to do everything from system design and site surveys to installation and engineering. The hiring spree at SolarCity isn’t slowing; it’s picking up speed as the company attempts to install twice as many rooftop solar systems than last year and readies its 1.2 million-square foot factory in New York, which is scheduled to reach full production in 2017. SolarCity SCTY -2.21% plans to eclipse 2014’s hiring numbers, CEO Lyndon Rive tells Fortune. In 2016, SolarCity will hire “quite a bit more” than it will in 2015, Rive says, though he didn’t provide specific numbers.

Peruvian Youth To Protest Against New Labor Law

January 17, 2015 TeleSur, www.telesurtv.net Resist! Labor, Law, Peru, Youth

The Peruvian youth group Dignity Collective will hold another demonstration Monday afternoon to protest against a new labor law approved earlier this month which undermines many labor rights for young workers. According to the organization, the Youth Labor Law will benefit transnational corporations, as it reduces vacation time, cuts a series of bonuses, and lowers wages. Even though the law only applies for people between the ages 18 and 24, critics expect for these corporations to fire older employees and replace them with young people to take advantage of the law. Monday’s scheduled protest follows one of the biggest protests recorded over the last 10 years when thousands of young people marched in the streets of Peru’s capital Lima on Friday.

Faith, Labor Leaders Ask Pols To Focus On Morals

January 14, 2015 Matthew Hamilton, www.blog.timesunion.com Resist! Faith, Labor, North Carolina

Community, faith and labor groups took advantage of the silence at the state Capitol Monday to hold a brief vigil to call for state politicians to concentrate on passing what they say is morally sound legislation this year. The “Moral Monday” vigil comes two days before the state Senate and Assembly will convene for the first time this year. Those gathered outside the Senate Chamber didn’t call for anything they haven’t already; rather, they placed the emphasis on the morality of raising the minimum wage, upping public school funding and assisting non-wealthy New Yorkers. “This year, this group is calling on our legislators to start paying attention and start listening to the people of New York who need them to create good jobs, institute systems of fair taxation and invest in public education and a social safety net,” Labor-Religion Coalition of New York State Executive Director Sara Niccoli said.

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