New Orleans Reports on the closing of the AFL-CIO quadrennial convention in Los Angeles were depressing to me. Sure, I liked hearing Rich Trumka almost endorse my long standing call for “majority unionism” by saying labor needed “to build a movement not for the 99 percent but of the 99 percent. Not just the 11 …
Category: Labor Organizing
AFL-CIO’s Membership Expansion Largely Symbolic
New Orleans By a voice vote the AFL-CIO delegates in convention approved a resolution to expand the membership to other groups. The measure appears to be largely a symbolic gesture about buildinga larger coalition for political issues and defense against attacks against working families, rather than a real effort to reverse the long decline in …
Chavez, Alinsky, the UFW, and the Modern Labor Movement
New Orleans Frank Bardacke’s Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers is a mountain of a book at 800 pages. Reportedly, it took Bardacke fifteen years to write and was edited down from twice that length. A friend said to me recently that he believed it might be …