labor unions « Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog

NLRB New Rules: Quicker Elections, More Hearings, Longer Cert Delays

New Orleans The NLRB has announced a new rule-making procedure on representation elections. Labor will try to paint lipstick on this pig, and business and their political friends will claim this is the end of the world as they know it, but in truth unions know this is not what they had wanted or [...]

The AFL-CIO Continues to Step Forward with “New Labor”

New Orleans John Hiatt, now the AFL-CIO chief of staff under Richard Trumka, and previously general counsel under John Sweeney, was [...]

Stephen Lerner, the Banks, and the Right-wing Scare Machine

New Orleans The right blogosphere and websites were all heavy breathing about another “secret” tape claiming longtime SEIU organizer and strategist, Stephen Lerner, was an “economic terrorist” advocating that the masses should bring the banks and Wall Street to its knees. At one level it is hard to suppress a yawn. Anger [...]

Labor versus Business: From Economic Wars to Culture Wars?

New Orleans I wonder with the diminishing strength of unions whether we are about to finally move from front page economic wars to the back page culture wars so much enjoyed by the right. Not able to fully move women back to the kitchen or African-Americans back to the plantation, perhaps they feel they [...]

Initiative Campaigns Could Save Unions and Obama in Ohio in 2012

New Orleans In a wild case of unintended consequences the current Republican attack on unions in New Jersey, Indiana, [...]

Are we Hearing the Death Knell for Unions?

New Orleans The backdrop to the great excitement and fight back in Wisconsin, Ohio, and India for the labor movement seems to be a very black curtain that some are trying to pull across the stage. The evidence seems everywhere. Steven Greenhouse, one of the last labor reporters, sounded the death knell in the [...]

Collective Bargaining Under Attack

New Orleans It’s hard hearing and reading the reports about the attack on unions in Wisconsin. After a life of avoiding the mass emails of any listserv, I ended up on one arbitrarily when I joined a group, so I’ve been inundated with hyperbolic messages that find the pushback in Wisconsin by labor heroic [...]

Responding to Public Cutbacks: UK-Uncut

New Orleans With every headline at every level of government talking about severe cutbacks, a loss of over 1 million American public sector jobs already, and given the depth of the Great Recession unions and others seem in the bunker and on the defensive without much of a response, perhaps there’s [...]

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