By Bob Hennelly

The UAW’s winning streak, including a lopsided union recognition vote last month at a Volkswagen plant in “right-to-work” state Tennessee, came to an end at a Mercedes plant in Alabama thanks to a flagrantly illegal counter-campaign led by plant management and backed up by a powerful coalition of southern Republican Governors.

By Phil Cohen

In 1976 the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and the Textile Workers Union of America merged to form the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union. It was a marriage of convenience, rooted in necessity, between very disparate cultures.

By Steve Wishnia

The union campaign at the Bloom Medicinals medical-marijuana dispensary in Akron, Ohio began in the break room early last year. Dispensary agents Krispin Horner and Ev Lindrose were both angry that a coworker had just been fired, Lindrose recalls.

By Bob Hennelly

Four days before protestors took over Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall on April 30, trapping building service workers from TWU Local 241 inside for a harrowing half-hour to 45 minutes, their union wrote university officials to flag their concerns. 

By Joe Maniscalco

In 2020, with much of the nation biting its fingernails wondering what to do if Donald J. Trump refused to leave office after losing the presidential election — David Van Deusen, then head of the Vermont State Labor Council, was ready to lead a general strike across his state to help kick him out if needed. It was a bold and defiant move that late AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka hated so much, he threatened to take over the VSLC.

By Steve Wishnia

The 12 most unsafe employers in the U.S. encompass corporate behemoths like Walmart and Tyson Foods; tech titans Uber, Lyft, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX; and a Wisconsin lumber mill that hired a 14-year-old to run power saws, according to the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health.

By Steve Wishnia

The Supreme Court’s far-right majority seems to be leaning toward narrowing the grounds on which the National Labor Relations Board [NLRB] can ask federal courts to order employers to reinstate fired union supporters while their unfair-labor-practice cases are pending.

By Joe Maniscalco

This year’s Labor Notes Conference in Chicago featured workshops reflecting labor’s support for single payer health care. What could not be ignored, however, are those powerful forces within the house of labor itself who not only oppose single payer — but who are actively pushing the privatization of traditional Medicare through so-called Medicare Advantage plans.

Or as one prominent single payer advocate Work-Bites spoke to called it — the “bastardization of Medicare.”

War Stories By Phil Cohen

During the spring of 1995, I was assigned to negotiate a first contract at the BTR Sealing Systems factory in Reidsville, North Carolina; recently organized by ACTWU (now Workers United.) The 450 hourly workers were engaged in the production of wiper blades for major automobile companies.

By Joe Maniscalco

In the span of two days, New York City retirees battling to save Medicare from extinction have called out corrupt union misleaders willing to sell out the entire labor movement for Medicare Advantage; challenged President Joe Biden to finally get real about what needs to be done to rescue Medicare; and provided a game plan on how to win back rank and file control from the misleadership class.

By Steve Wishnia

Florida’s legislature has passed a broad pre-emption bill that will prohibit local governments from enacting heat-safety regulations or requiring their contractors to pay more than the state’s $12-an-hour minimum wage.

By Bob Hennelly

On March 26, the day after the commemoration of the 113th anniversary of the Triangle factory fire that killed 146 mostly female immigrant garment workers in lower Manhattan — a crew of a half-dozen immigrant men in a non-union paving crew fell 185 feet to their deaths from Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key bridge after it was rammed by the Dali, a rudderless massive cargo ship that was trying to leave the port without a tug escort.

By Kevin Van Meter

A slim volume by London-based organizers Lydia Hughes and Jamie Woodcock, Troublemaking: Why You Should Organize Your Workplace, released in 2023 from Verso Books, draws upon workers movements in Britain, India, Argentina, South Africa, Brazil, across Europe, and the United States. “Being a troublemaker,” the authors argue, “is about trying to build power at work. Building power is always a process. It requires bringing workers together, developing confidence and discerning ways to win.”

By Ryn Gargulinski

Get a secure job. Work yourself to the bone. Be loyal, trustworthy and responsible to your employer – and you’ll be rewarded in the end.

And if you believe all that, I got a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.

By Phil Cohen

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy – William Shakespeare

During the spring of 1995, ACTWU (now Workers United) scheduled a blitz of nonmembers at the unionized Cone Mills textile plant in Greensboro, North Carolina. Organizers, accompanied by an activist from one of Cone’s three union shops, would be issued house-call packets containing addresses and information regarding workers that would be visited in specified neighborhoods.

By Joe Maniscalco

Here it is, another Women’s History Month — the officially sanctioned time of year when, after enough decades have passed, we’re all encouraged to enthusiastically applaud the achievements of marginalized working class heroes from a safe and non-threatening distance.

By Steve Wishnia

Two economic statistics, a side topic where I recently encountered them, tell a stark story about the history of this country during the last century.

The share of U.S. income going to the top 10% in 2022 was the highest it’s been since 1940, at 48.3%, according to a report released Feb. 13 by the Economic Policy Institute on right-to-work-for-less laws.

By Bob Hennelly

February 11, would have been Eduardo “Eddie” Granado’s 57th birthday. But he didn’t make it. Instead, Granado died in his sleep a week before Christmas from an aggressive form of rectal cancer he contracted after his occupational exposure to the highly toxic air that permeated in and around lower Manhattan for the months after the 9/11 attack.

By Joe Maniscalco

Right now, there are people in industries across the United States working very hard to raise their families, but who are openly worrying they have…maybe…one year left before AI takes their jobs. 

By Phil Cohen

During 1993, the Kmart Distribution Center in Greensboro, North Carolina became the company’s first hard goods warehouse to be organized. The newly-opened facility offered lower wages and benefits than its Northern counterparts and unlike them, the majority of workers were nonwhite. Focusing on economics and racism had given ACTWU (now Workers United) a decisive organizing victory, led by Assistant Southern Director Ernest Bennett.