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Un/Employment

  • 100,000 Irish Workers Take To The Streets
    13 December 2005 par (Open-Publishing)

    It is estimated by the police that over 100,000 workers took to the streets of Dublin the Irish capital. While tens of thousand of workers brought the main cities and towns across the country to a complete stand still as they took to the street both in solidarity with the Irish Ferries workers and against the wide spread exploitation of migrant workers. Workers are outraged at the use of migrant workers particularly from Eastern Europe to undermine the wages and conditions of all workers. (…)

  • Restore Workers’ Freedom to Form Unions
    3 December 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    2 comments

    by AFL-CIO
    As part of International Human Rights Day, Dec. 10, the union movement is mobilizing to demand workers are guaranteed a fundamental human right: The freedom to have a union voice on the job. At rallies, town hall meetings, candlelight vigils and teach-ins across the nation, union members and their allies will highlight the obstacles workers face when seeking to join a union at work and showcase strategies for the overcoming those obstacles.
    Workers taking part in Dec. 10 (…)

  • Halliburton (KBR) workers in Iraq paid 50 cents an hour
    2 December 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    36 comments

    WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 (UPI) — While the United States spends billions on troop support in Iraq, the people serving the meals, scooping the ice cream, and washing the dishes make as little as 50 cents an hour.
    The U.S. military has paid Halliburton subsidiary KBR about $12 billion so far for so-called logistics support to U.S. military personnel in Iraq, the largest contract of its kind ever. Around 80,000 troops are served meals at dining facilities every day under the contract — the other (…)

  • Food Workers Union Steps up Healthcare Reform Push
    24 November 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    1 comment

    by Brendan Coyne
    Joining the efforts of a government-founded national organization devoted to finding a workable solution to growing problems with the United States’s healthcare system, one of the nation’s largest unions yesterday announced its intention to actively engage members in the conversation. The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) is the first labor union to join the two-year-old Citizens’ Health Care Working Group.
    According to information compiled by the Working Group, (…)

  • Symbol of the System
    22 November 2005 par (Open-Publishing)

    What do you get when you cross gutted labor laws with a corporate culture of impunity? Why, Wal-Mart, of course!
    By Christopher Hayes
    There’s a moment in Robert Greenwald’s new documentary, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, that serves as a perfect metaphor for the entire battle between organized labor and the country’s largest private employer.
    Josh Noble, an employee of the Tire and Lube Express division of a Wal-Mart in Loveland, Colorado, is attempting to organize 17 of his (…)

  • The failing of small towns across America is a canary in the coal mine.
    21 November 2005 par (Open-Publishing)

    Jobs are disappearing everywhere across the country. We can no longer sit silent while Washington denudes the U.S. of its farms, ranches, factories, defenses, and wealth. Make no mistake - this country is being gutted like a corporate takeover. The people are being left with nothing.
    Our military is being wasted in Iraq to enrich defense contractors. Oil is just a small part of that picture.
    And when there are no factories left to manufacture a defense, when we are importing everything, (…)

  • USING ILLEGAL LABOR TO CLEAN UP AFTER KATRINA
    18 November 2005 par (Open-Publishing)

    By Roberto Lovato
    Halliburton and its subcontractors hired hundreds of undocumented Latino workers to clean up after Katrina — only to mistreat them and throw them out without pay.
    Arnulfo Martinez recalls seeing lots of hombres del ejercito standing at attention. Though he was living on the Belle Chasse Naval Base near New Orleans when President Bush spoke there on Oct. 11, he didn’t understand anything the ruddy man in the rolled-up sleeves was saying to the troops. Martinez, 16, (…)

  • Is AFL-CIO’s International Solidarity Center A Subsidiary of the U.S. State Department?
    18 November 2005 par (Open-Publishing)

    By Harry Kelber
    In 1997, the AFL-CIO established the American Center for International Labor Solidarity to develop organizing strategies for international campaigns and cooperative relations with labor federations in other countries.
    Solidarity Center replaced the four regional institutes under former President Lane Kirkland , whose staffs, operating in some 80 countries, had been involved with CIA agents to destabilize democratically-elected governments in the Dominican Republic, Brazil (…)

  • The Wal-Mart 22
    9 November 2005 par (Open-Publishing)

    by Jonathan Tasini
    Jonathan Tasini is president of the Economic Future Group and writes his "Working In America" columns for TomPaine.com on an occasional basis. His blog Working Life chronicles the labor movement and other issues affecting American workers.
    Last week, I attended the screening of Robert Greenwald’s new film, “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price.” It is a great piece of investigative work that gives voice to the people and communities Wal-Mart has destroyed. You have to (…)

  • Immigrants often unpaid for Katrina work
    6 November 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    2 comments

    GULFPORT, Miss. — A pattern is emerging as the cleanup of Mississippi’s Gulf Coast morphs into its multibillion-dollar reconstruction: Come payday, untold numbers of Hispanic immigrant laborers are being stiffed. Sometimes, the boss simply vanishes. Other workers wait on promises that soon, someone in a complex hierarchy of contractors will provide the funds to pay them.
    Nonpayment of wages is a violation of federal labor law, but these workers - thousands of them, channeled into teams (…)