Sheffield Visiting with a British union organizer in touch with colleagues in the United States, I was shocked, though perhaps I should not have been, when he told me he had been hearing of worst-case scenario meetings of labor strategists meeting after the election estimating that the American labor movement could lose 3 to 5 …
Tag: union membership
Anti-Union Forces Leaving the Courts and Statehouse to Hit the Doors
New Orleans The assault on unions is getting very personal. The legislative and legal attacks are part of the environment of constant struggle between unions and companies of course. People try to talk about America as a classless society, but when it comes to the labor-management tussle at work and in community, the class struggle …
Latest Report on Union Density Finds a Finger Hold on the Cliff
New Orleans The top-line numbers from the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report on union membership density in the United States for 2015 indicate little change, sort of a “no news is good news” kind of story. Private sector density continued to suck at 6.7% of all private employment, but that was a slight improvement …
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 …
Non-Standard Workers are the New Informal Workforce in Japan
New Orleans Casual, temporary, irregular (Korea), part-time, and informal are all terms of art in different countries describing everywhere essentially the same global workforce phenomena in the race to the bottom for public and corporate employers sweating labor from workers on a come-as-you-are, no benefits, we-will-call-you-whenever-we-need-you basis. We learned from hours of intensive dialogue with …