- Unions Are at Their Lowest Levels in Decades—To Gain Power We Must Stop Following the Rules (2/1/2017) - If Donald Trump’s first week as president wasn’t depressing enough, Thursday brought a report that showed union membership fell in 2016. Union members are now just 10.7% of the overall workforce and only 6.7% of the private sector. Those are the lowest levels since the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) began tracking them in the early 1980s—and possibly the lowest since the 1920s. Bosses and union haters will crow that unions are dying institutions and… …
- From Company Town to Rebel City: Richmond, California Shows How Progressives Can Win (1/11/2017) - Rebel cities have long been laboratories for progressive policy experimentation. Specifically, the small Bay Area city of Richmond, California has stood out for its boldness. It’s now the subject of a new book by Steve Early, Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City, set to be released next Tuesday by Beacon Press. A long-time labor activist and frequent writer for In These Times, Early moved to Richmond five years… …
- Fighting Trump Isn’t Enough—We Must Also Wage War Within the Democratic Party (11/17/2016) - What reasonable American does not feel some amount of bitterness about the stunning election win of the short-fingered vulgarian scion of an outer borough slumlord, who squandered a billion-dollar casino fortune, and reinvented himself as a reality TV star and racist demagogue? There’s plenty of acrimony to go around. The cadre of technocratic campaigners, pollsters and pundits trained to campaign on promises of “we’re not as awful as the other guys” is already pointing fingers… …
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- Response to Rosenblum, LaLuz and McAlevey (10/25/2016) - [New Labor Forum invited Jonathan Rosenblum, José La Luz and Jane McAlevey to respond to my article, "Two Reasons Why Most Unions Don’t Do Large-Scale Organizing", and then gave me an opportunity to respond back. This is that published response.] The respondents have expanded the discussion far beyond the parameters of my initial article. I have written elsewhere about union structure, strategy, and legal reform, but my preceding article does not purport to offer an… …
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- The Two-Tier Provision in the Chicago Teachers Union’s Tentative Agreement, Explained (10/18/2016) - The tentative agreement that the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) struck with district management less than an hour before a midnight October 10 strike deadline has been hailed by many as a victory. Facing another round of concessionary demands, the union managed to extract $88 million from the mayor’s corporate slush fund to restore some badly needed funding to the school system. The union also managed to win an increase in compensation. But the way that… …
- The Other Chicago Teachers’ Strike (10/7/2016) - As the countdown to the Chicago Teachers Union’s October 11 strike deadline approaches, another teachers’ union in Chicago has voted to authorize a strike as their own contract negotiations have dragged on over strikingly similar disagreements. The teachers and staff at the fifteen-campus UNO Charter School Network (UCSN) have spent seven months bargaining for a successor to their groundbreaking first collective bargaining agreement. But talks with management have stalled. So this week, all but one… …
- Two Reasons Why Most Unions Don’t Do Large-Scale Organizing (10/6/2016) - In 2005, the labor movement split, ostensibly over a disagreement about the institutional priority of organizing for membership growth. A number of unions seceded from the AFL-CIO to form a rival federation, Change to Win, only to (mostly) quietly return to the fold. Other unions merged, only to attempt to divorce shortly thereafter. There have been trusteeships and membership raids, and some very good comprehensive campaigns for new members and new bargaining units. But as… …
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- The Fight to Save UMass Labor Center Is a Fight for Worker Power (9/13/2016) - The Labor Center at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) at Amherst is in turmoil. Its director, Eve Weinbaum, says she was abruptly pushed out of the position. In an alarming e-mail to alumni, students and allies, she protested funding cuts to teaching assistants and part-time instructors and, more troublingly, threats to the “Labor Studies faculty’s autonomy to make programmatic decisions and to designate a Director.” Founded in 1964, the Labor Center is one of about… …
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- Review of Sarah Jaffe’s “Necessary Trouble” (8/23/2016) - Something is happening. Socialism is no longer a dirty word (the “S-word”), but something a sizeable portion of Americans tell pollsters is their preferred vision for society. It’s no longer an anachronism to speak of “the Left.” A brave and quickly organized movement for black lives has not only sparked a new civil rights movement but has gotten many of us to see the criminal justice system for what it is: the evolution of Jim… …
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- When the Hell Did the NLRB Become More Activist Than Labor? (7/12/2016) - When the hell did the federal government get bolder than most labor unions about asserting the legal rights of workers? On Monday, in a 3-1 ruling, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) reversed a Bush the Younger-era precedent that gave employers a say over whether temporary and subcontracted workers can be included in the same bargaining unit as the regular, full-time employees with whom they work beside. Go figure, most employers said “no” to the… …
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