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Un/Employment

  • New Alito Opposition Efforts Launched
    9 January 2006 par (Open-Publishing)
    10 comments

    By civilrights.org staff
    With Samuel Alito’s confirmation hearings scheduled to begin next week, groups opposed to President Bush’s nominee to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court are stepping up their efforts to inform the public about Alito’s record.
    IndependentCourt.org, a coalition of public interest organizations, launched a new 30-second television spot Wednesday focusing on the fact that as a federal judge, Alito has more than once broken promises he made to the Senate (…)

  • Coal mine blast gives industry black eye
    9 January 2006 par (Open-Publishing)
    1 comment

    By Steve James
    NEW YORK (Reuters) - The blast that killed 12 miners in a West Virginia mine has given coal mining a black eye just as the long-stagnant industry had begun turning a profit after decades of red ink.
    Analysts and industry experts said on Wednesday that the disaster, in which the 12 missing men were at first mistakenly reported alive, could have a negative impact on recruitment at a time when the industry is short of skilled workers.
    However, they did not believe the (…)

  • Is The Strike Dead? Not According to Bob Schwartz...
    4 January 2006 par (Open-Publishing)

    by Steve Early
    Three years ago in Boston, downtown streets and office buildings were the scene of inspiring immigrant worker activism during an unprecedented strike by local janitors. Their walk-out was backed by other union members, community activists, students and professors, public officials, religious leaders, and even a few "socially-minded" businessmen. The janitors had long been invisible, mistreated by management and, until recently, ignored by their own SEIU local union. (…)

  • WHAT LABOR CAN’T SAY
    3 January 2006 par (Open-Publishing)
    2 comments

    by Aldon Morris and Dan Clawson
    What kind of labor writing gets suppressed in the U.S. today? Apparently it doesn’t take much.
    We wrote an article on "Lessons of the Civil Rights Movement for Building a Worker Rights Movement" whose last paragraph said:
    Finally, a fundamental question faces workers today: do they have the courage to get up off their knees and confront powerful employers and corporations? A movement requires moral authority and enormous sacrifices by its participants (…)

  • 10 Good Things about Another Bad Year
    1 January 2006 par (Open-Publishing)

    By Medea Benjamin
    As we close this year, a year in which we were pummeled by the Iraq war, attacks on our civil rights, and Mother Nature’s fury of hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis, there is no shortage of reasons to feel bruised and beaten. But to start the New Year with a healthy determination to keep on fighting, we need to reflect on the good things that happened. And there are plenty.
    One continent alone - South America - could provide more than ten examples of wonderful (…)

  • A Fight for the Future
    1 January 2006 par (Open-Publishing)

    by JOSHUA B. FREEMAN
    Editor’s Note: Bus and subway workers in New York City agreed to return to work and to the bargaining table Thursday as negotiators for the Transport Workers Union and the Metropolitan Transit Authority worked on a final settlement after a two-day strike that immobilized the city. Joshua B. Freeman examines the history and issues at stake: the fight against the lie that abstract, neutral economic necessity, not the ideas and interests of the rich and powerful, are (…)

  • Both sides did what they had to
    25 December 2005 par (Open-Publishing)

    by Juan Gonzalez
    For three days, their transit strike had paralyzed America’s greatest city, and now it was time to go back to work.
    The 33,700 members of Transport Workers Union Local 100 were exhausted. They had incurred the wrath of millions of transit riders, of Mayor Bloomberg, of Gov. Pataki, of the city’s entire business establishment, even of their own parent union in Washington. For violating the Taylor Law, the local and each individual striker still face huge fines.
    Still, (…)

  • It’s clear Bloomberg just didn’t get it
    25 December 2005 par (Open-Publishing)

    by Errol Louis
    Mayor Bloomberg yesterday confirmed that he stood by every word of his televised outburst against the Transport Workers Union’s leadership at the height of this week’s strike. He called them "thuggish," "selfish," "frauds" and the like. A host of critics, such as state Sen. Kevin Parker of Brooklyn, now accuse the mayor of being racially divisive.
    "We only need to look back to the day and time when MTA workers first gained the kind of pension and benefits which are now (…)

  • New York City transit strike was quashed by the unions
    24 December 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    2 comments

    By Bill Van Auken
    A group of top union officials in New York City played the key role in bringing about the abrupt end of the New York City transit strike, brokering a deal that leaves 34,000 subway and bus workers exposed to punishing financial penalties and the continued drive by their employer, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), to extract far-reaching concessions.
    This was the first shutdown of the nation’s largest mass transit system in 25 years. It expressed the (…)

  • Time To Say No
    21 December 2005 par (Open-Publishing)

    By David Bacon
    It’s time to say no.
    Every new Republican proposal for immigration reform in Congress makes the prospect for winning legal status for the nation’s 12 million undocumented residents more remote. At the same time, Congress appears ready to pass measures that will increase border deaths, lead to wholesale violations of workers’ rights, and give the country’s largest corporations a huge new bracero program.
    Supporters of immigrant and workers’ rights face a moment of truth. (…)