“By making race and family heritage a part of the campaign, Senator Gardenhire owes the people of District 10 a full explanation of his family’s slave-trading past,” says Muhammad.
UMWA’s Smith stresses the importance of passing the legislation soon. “Failure to pass this bill this year will put the lives of some 16,000 retired miners, their dependents and widows at immediate risk, as they will lose their health care at the end of December. About 6,500 more will be at risk of losing their health care in 2017.”
“We call it the curb effect,” he says. “Just like the [ramp at the] curb also makes it easier for [pedestrians with] a piece of luggage or a stroller. It ends up helping everyone.”
“We never stopped from last year,” said Paul Schaffer, who was the lead organizer on the campaign. “Our volunteer organizing committee kept fighting and kept going on strong.”
Workers says that the intimidation by Volkswagen follows a pattern that the company has been engaged in since the defeat of the UAW union drive at its Chattanooga plant in February of 2013.
Today, several hundred UAW supporters blocked street corners throughout Albany to protest the decision by the federal government to extend an $18.3 million contract to Honeywell, who has locked out nearly 400 workers in South Bend, Indiana and Green Island, New York for four months.
The fastest-growing region in the United States for union membership is the South, where nearly 150,000 workers opted to join unions last year — bringing the total number of union members in the South to nearly three million. Five of the top 10 fastest-growing states for union membership in 2015 were all in the South. If those number surprise you, that might be because there is not a single full-time labor reporter anywhere in the South.
A federal ruling this week in a Memphis union campaign underscores the toothless and ineffectiveness of labor law. For the past seven years, workers there have been attempting to organize and collectively bargain at several Ozburn-Hessey Logistics (OHL) distribution centers.
Today, media workers at Law360 struck a decisive blow in the burgeoning media workers rights movement. Staff at the legal news publication voted 109 to 9 to join the NewsGuild in a National Labor Relations Board election.
OSHA fined a Tyson’s chicken plant in Center, Texas $263,498 for two repeated violations and 15 serious safety violations.
OSHA issued a citation against a Pilgrim’s Pride chicken slaughterhouse and processing facility for, among other serious violations, failing to promptly refer injured workers to medical attention.
Across the South, activists say that the Sanders movement has given them energy to push against the issues of economic and racial inequality that plague even Democratic-leaning cities, such as Chattanooga.