Although more than one million Pennsylvanians are members of labor unions, and the state has a long history of worker exploitation and union activism, neither of the two largest university systems has a labor representative on its governing board. Continue reading
I like to ask friends about the oddest summer job they ever had. One talks about how he used to don a rubber suit every morning at a Sylvania electronics plant in Syracuse, NY, and climb into a tank, where he dipped television tubes into some sort of mercury solution. He now moonlights as a thermometer. Continue reading
What the story? Last year Verizon made $12 billion in profits, got $1 billion in government subsidies and paid zippo, zero in taxes. But instead of sharing this windfall with the working people who make the company successful, Verizon has the audacity to demand their workers take pay and benefit cuts of $20,000 a year. This at the same time that Verizon’s four top executives have pocketed over $258 million (a quarter of a billion) in the past four years, which is obscene. Continue reading
ROME—When in the early part of this millennium I was writing a rather surrealistic novel, ASHEVILLE, about the town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina where I started out my life, I ran into the story of the Asheville-based self-professed Communist writer, Olive Tilford Dargan, of whom I had never heard before. Visiting then her gravesite in the little known Green Hills Cemetery in West Asheville and researching her and her activities I fell into a gossamer review of early 19th century labor struggles in the good old U.S. South. Continue reading
An obscure clause that was slipped into Ohio’s infamous anti-union Senate Bill 5 may spell the end of collective bargaining for the state’s public college teachers. Continue reading
There’s a joke making the rounds and it goes like this: Big Business, a Tea Partier and Organized Labor are sitting around a table. A dozen cookies arrive on a plate. Big Business takes 11 of them and says to the Tea Partier, “Pssst! That union guy is trying to steal your cookie!” Continue reading
As expected, Michael Moore, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka were in Madison, Wisc., to support and rally the workers in their fight against the union-busting governor and Republican-dominated state legislature. Continue reading
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