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THIS WEEK IN LABOR: June 28, 2008
July 01, 2008House backs paid leave for federal workers The Democratic-run House voted along party lines June 20, 230-194, for eight weeks of paid family leave for the nation’s 2.7 million federal workers. The remaining four weeks of the annual family leave that federal workers get would be unpaid, as are all 12 of the weeks they now receive. The vote was a victory for the two unions, the American Federation of...
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Yes, we did
May 24, 2008Obama hits delegate milestone as primaries near endPORTLAND, Ore. — Oregon and Kentucky primary voters May 20 gave Barack Obama the majority of elected delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention, virtually assuring his nomination as that party’s candidate for the presidency. Even before the votes were all counted that night he declared in a victory speech in Iowa that John McCain is now the focus of the campaign. He...
Read moreThey take care of their own
April 26, 2008If anything ever smelled of cronyism and favoritism it was the recent decision by the Federal Reserve to set up a special bargain basement where cheap loans are now available to Wall Street kingpins largely responsible for screwing up our economy. The Fed has, in effect, put the biggest and most powerful investment banks on welfare at the expense of working-class taxpayers. The decision to do this settles, once and...
Read moreWhats on - April 19, 2008
April 19, 2008BERKELEY, Calif. May 3, Sat., café 7 p.m., cabaret 8 p.m. The Bolshevik Café: Music, stand-up comedy & spoken word plus display: 50 years of political posters, t-shirts & other left memorabilia. Put the social in socialism, the comic in communism & pizza in the proletariat! Sliding scale admission $5 - $15, food sold separately. At Finn Hall, 1819 10th St. Sponsored by Billie Holiday Collective. Info: (415) 863-6637 or...
Read moreThis week in labor
April 19, 2008Unions abroad boost workers here The Communications Workers of America and Germany’s biggest union have established a jointly run trans-Atlantic group, called T Union, to organize and represent T-Mobile workers. Although T-Mobile is aggressively anti-union, its German parent firm, Deutsche Telekom, is unionized and has unionists on its board of directors who can exert influence to assist the CWA’s organizing drive. Bush’s joblessness surge Official unemployment rates surged 0.3 percent...
Read moreThis Week in Labor: Unemployment, NLRB failures, mortgage crisis...
April 12, 2008Bush’s joblessness surge Official unemployment rates surged 0.3 percent in March to 5.1 percent. Included in the official surge were 434,000 more jobless, 48,000 more factory jobs lost, 51,000 construction jobs lost and more than one-third of the jobless out of work for longer than 14 weeks. The data shows almost 2 million more people were jobless in March than when Bush entered the Oval Office in January 2001. The...
Read moreTHIS WEEK IN LABOR: March 29
March 28, 2008Modern-day slavery Modern-day slavery in the Pascagoula, Miss., shipyards has drawn protests from the International Trade Union Confederation. The ITUC, to which the AFL-CIO belongs, demanded March 18 that the U.S. take action on behalf of 500 dockworkers from India who have filed suit against Signal International. They accuse the marine construction company of subjecting them to forced labor, trafficking, fraud and civil rights violations. Enticed by deceptive advertisements promising...
Read moreOhio, Texas could decide Dem primary race
February 15, 2008Unexpectedly, voters in Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania could be the decision-makers in the tight Democratic presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Landslide victories by Obama in a series of caucuses and primaries in the past week set the stage for all-out contests in the March 4 primaries in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island and Vermont, and the April 22 Pennsylvania primary. With John McCain appearing to lock up the...
Read moreWriters win some after 14-week strike
February 15, 2008Against enormous odds and with television and film writers united behind them, leaders of the Writers Guild of America have negotiated a contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers that amounts to a significant win for labor. If you have one of those big screens you can start it up and get ready for better quality entertainment to replace the reruns and “reality” shows you’ve been watching....
Read moreAmazing race
February 08, 2008Energized voters are the ‘change makers’ In the wake of the day dubbed “Super Duper Tuesday,” some things seem clear. One is that, with Obama overcoming earlier double-digit Clinton leads in eight of the 10 largest states and winning a majority of the vote in 13 of the 22 states at issue in the Feb. 5 Democratic primaries, the quest for the Democratic nomination continues, probably well into the spring....
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