By Ryn Gargulinski

“Mondays suck.” “Today is going to be the worst workday ever.” “The world is going to hell in a handbasket.” Raise your hand if any of those thoughts crossed your mind in the last year. The last month. The last week. The last five minutes?

By Phil Cohen

During the early 1930’s, anyone could pay the city $10 for a taxi medallion to register their vehicle for livery service. The small silver shield, attached to the hood of their car, documented drivers were licensed to transport passengers who hailed them on the street.

By Steve Wishnia

Donald Trump should go to prison.

Much of the punditry following his conviction on 34 Class E felony charges on May 30 quoted supposed “experts” saying he’s unlikely to get jail time, as he’s 77 years old, a first offender, and E felonies are the least serious felonies in the New York State penal code. Oh, and it might be politically divisive.

By Steve Wishnia

Randy Fannon, vice president for safety at the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, says in his 37 years working for railroads, the “most drastic” changes have come in the last five years.

By Steve Wisnia

On May 23, the Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency announced a proposed settlement in which the Norfolk Southern railroad would pay more than $310 million to cover remediation costs from the February 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. The town of 4,800 people had to be partially evacuated after about 50 cars on a 9,300-foot train derailed, including five carrying vinyl chloride, and some caught fire. The highly toxic gas, used in plastic manufacturing, had to be released and burned to avert an explosion.

By Bill Barry

Courtesy of Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee

It happens all the time: a supervisor suddenly approaches one of your best organizing committee members, screams a lot of false accusations about bad work, bad attendance, or bad attitude at them, and then tells them that they are fired.

By Phil Cohen

I received a call from Mill Chair Clara Moser the next morning at 8 am. She frantically told me security guards had been stationed at the plant entrance to prevent me from entering. Management claimed to have video showing me kicking a hole in the wall as I exited on Thursday.

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.”