Home > Keywords > Politics > Trade unions

Trade unions

  • 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 (…)

  • WHY I AM ON STRIKE
    13 December 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    1 comment

    By Michelle Fawcett
    When I moved to NYC to start a Ph.D. program at NYU in 2000, my biggest concern was not the rigors of graduate study or the challenge of moving to another new city alone. It was the fear of being unable to survive economically.
    Sure, I was going to work in addition to being a student: as a graduate assistant, or GA, for my department. GAs work as research assistants (RAs) or teaching assistants (TAs).
    The work of an RA might include co-editing an article with a (…)

  • 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 (…)

  • Work Stoppages Spike - Look Who Noticed
    3 December 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    1 comment

    by Michael Hirsch
    The Wall Street Journal, which maddeningly restricts nearly all its on-line content to print-edition subscribers, is two-faced. It’s pro-corporate editorial/opinion section carries the same primal sensibility that Jack London ascribed to leaders of America’s business classes when he called them "cavemen in evening dress." The predictable, hard-right opinion pages are a Fox News with semi-colons, combining slavering respect for all-things Bushie with a loathing for unions (…)

  • 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 (…)

  • 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 (…)

  • AFL-CIO calls for Dec. 10 Mobilization: Largest-Ever for Workers’ Rights
    1 November 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    3 comments

    Working families and their allies are gearing up for the nation’s largest-ever mobilization to support workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain collectively. Throughout the week of Dec. 5-10, thousands of workers in 63 cities—and the number is growing daily—will take the fight to restore workers’ freedom to form unions to the White House, statehouses and front doors of employers that deny workers’ rights.
    The nationwide events are part of a massive global mobilization on Dec. 10, (…)

  • A Dutch activist addresses the new German Left party
    1 November 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    1 comment

    A regional councillor, adviser on employment and social policy to the United Left group of Euro-MPs, and member of the radical left Socialist Party of the Netherlands, this weekend addressed a conference of Germany’s new Left Party (Linkspartei/PDS). This is an edited version of his speech, which covered the experiences of his own highly successful party, the common struggle against the EU’s drive to neo-liberalism, and the role of the trade unions.
    The debate on the social model of Europe (…)

  • Philippines Left-Wing Union, Party Leaders Assassinated
    27 October 2005 par (Open-Publishing)

    By Oliver Teves
    Separate assassination attacks in the northern Philippines killed a union chief at a sugar plantation owned by former President Corazon Aquino’s family and a provincial official from a leading left-wing party, police and party leaders said Wednesday.
    Ricardo Ramos, president of the workers’ union at the Hacienda Luisita plantation in Tarlac province, was shot by an unknown assailant with an M-14 rifle late Tuesday as he talked with other unionists near his home. (…)