Category Archives: Labor

The history of May 1 as a workers’ holiday is intimately tied to the generations-long movement for the eight-hour day, to immigrant workers, to police brutality and repression of the labour movement, and to the long tradition of American anarchism. Continue reading →

Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) calls the government’s latest jobs and unemployment reports “nonsense numbers.” Continue reading →

Friday’s employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows 114,000 new jobs in September and a drop in the rate of unemployment from 8.1% to 7.8%. As 114,000 new jobs are not sufficient to stay even with population growth, the drop in the unemployment rate is the result of not counting discouraged workers who are defined away as “not in the labor force.” Continue reading →

Almost every conservative political columnist, pundit, commentator, blogger, and bloviator has written about the decline and forthcoming death of the labor movement. Continue reading →

In his report on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest jobs and unemployment report, statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) writes: “The July employment and unemployment numbers published today, August 3rd, were worthless and likely misleading. . . . Suspecting at one time that the jobs numbers were being rigged against him by his own Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), President Richard M. Nixon proposed a new approach to reporting the numbers. Although the proposed changes never were implemented, several decades later the BLS adopted reporting methods that were somewhat parallel to the late president’s thinking.” Continue reading →

Consolidated Edison Company of New York, our gas and electric power baron, and representatives of the Utility Workers of America will resume contract talks tomorrow. But there seems no end in sight to the lockout of 8,500 workers or the union’s protest at the utility’s Gramercy Park headquarters, and as New Yorkers continue to swelter in the ongoing heat wave. Continue reading →

Today (March 9, 2012), the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced that 227,000 new nonfarm payroll jobs were created by the economy during February. Is the government’s claim true? Continue reading →

Once, many years ago, in a land far away between two oceans, with fruited plains, amber waves of grain, and potholes on its highways, there lived a young man named Sam. Continue reading →

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and the international conglomerate EGT Development came to a tentative agreement on Monday to resolve their long simmering labor dispute. The agreement was announced in a statement released by Washington Governor Chris Gregoire, who convened the discussions that ultimately lead to the settlement. Continue reading →

A decisive struggle promising to shape the fate of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), West Coast dockworkers, and all organized labor is swiftly nearing a climax in Longview, Washington. Continue reading →

The following report is based on the work of statistician John Williams of shadowstats.com. Continue reading →

Although more than one million Pennsylvanians are members of labor unions, and the state has a long history of worker exploitation and union activism, neither of the two largest university systems has a labor representative on its governing board. Continue reading →

I like to ask friends about the oddest summer job they ever had. One talks about how he used to don a rubber suit every morning at a Sylvania electronics plant in Syracuse, NY, and climb into a tank, where he dipped television tubes into some sort of mercury solution. He now moonlights as a thermometer. Continue reading →

What the story? Last year Verizon made $12 billion in profits, got $1 billion in government subsidies and paid zippo, zero in taxes. But instead of sharing this windfall with the working people who make the company successful, Verizon has the audacity to demand their workers take pay and benefit cuts of $20,000 a year. This at the same time that Verizon’s four top executives have pocketed over $258 million (a quarter of a billion) in the past four years, which is obscene. Continue reading →

ROME—When in the early part of this millennium I was writing a rather surrealistic novel, ASHEVILLE, about the town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina where I started out my life, I ran into the story of the Asheville-based self-professed Communist writer, Olive Tilford Dargan, of whom I had never heard before. Visiting then her gravesite in the little known Green Hills Cemetery in West Asheville and researching her and her activities I fell into a gossamer review of early 19th century labor struggles in the good old U.S. South. Continue reading →

An obscure clause that was slipped into Ohio’s infamous anti-union Senate Bill 5 may spell the end of collective bargaining for the state’s public college teachers. Continue reading →

There’s a joke making the rounds and it goes like this: Big Business, a Tea Partier and Organized Labor are sitting around a table. A dozen cookies arrive on a plate. Big Business takes 11 of them and says to the Tea Partier, “Pssst! That union guy is trying to steal your cookie!” Continue reading →

As expected, Michael Moore, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka were in Madison, Wisc., to support and rally the workers in their fight against the union-busting governor and Republican-dominated state legislature. Continue reading →