Traditionally, the state’s Democratic governors, including Tim Kaine and Terry McAuliffe, hesitated in calling for its repeal; thus making Perriello call to repeal it a landmark position for Virginia Democrats.
Greetings from Chattanooga, Tenn., where Payday Senior Labor Reporter Mike Elk has been doing research on how an unusual coalition of non-establishment Berniecrats and black…
“We can’t find workers this year – it’s been tough,” says Julio Rubio of the Kentucky Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association. “Most of the workers we have at the track won’t even leave to go out at night to buy groceries because they are so scared of being deported.”
Last week, the State of Tennessee signed a five-year, $330 million deal that will lead to one of the largest outsourcing efforts of public jobs in state history. While the state promised that the move wouldn’t affect current employees, labor activists have said a reading of the fine print makes it clear that the state will try to get rid of as many employees as possible.
“Having a union doesn’t mean you have to have a majority of workers or a union contract,” said veteran union organizer Saladin Muhammad, co-founder of the Southern Workers Assembly. “A union exists whenever workers come together to form an organization to build power.”
“I had time to think about my life. Like what am I doing? What am I not doing? How can I make things right. I knew I did not want to come outside of prison being the same person I was going inside prison,” Coonrod told WRCB. “I began to knock on every door. Reach out to elected officials saying hey I need some help. I need you to help me help my community.”
University of Wyoming Labor Law Professor Mike Duff tells Payday’s Mike Elk that it is likely the Trump Administration will slowly kill the investigation. Duff and Elk discuss what type of enforcement actions the Trump Administration is going to allow and why the Google investigation is unlikely to continue.
In an exclusive interview with Payday, Perez says that he wants to see Democratic politicians get more involved in building community support for labor struggles in the South, like the recent union drives at Boeing in South Carolina and Volkswagen in Chattanooga, Tenn., where Republican politicians vigorously fought against unionization. If Perez is able to get Southern Democrats to embrace the labor movement, it would be a significant reversal of practices by the Democratic Party.
Regions like Alabama’s Black Belt and the Mississippi Delta receive approximately 1/10, per capita, of the national average of funding from foundations. Between 2010 to 2014, foundations donated, on average, $41 dollars towards philanthropic causes in the regions, while nationally, foundations donated $451 per person, according to the NCRP’s research.
The emails show that Republican State Senator Todd Gardenhire met with top UTC officials on March 20 and urged the firing of Helbert. Following the meeting, UTC Chancellor Steve Angle argued that Helbert should be fired.
“The potential repercussions for the state representative and UTC are HUGE,” wrote Angle in an email obtained by the Chattanooga Times-Free Press. “We could easily lose all funding we are providing to WUTC.”
We discuss how Thurgood Marshall would drive into small towns in the South expecting to have his life threatened and lose civil rights challenges just to build case law Also, the Alabama NAACP and Greater Birmingham Ministries have a pending lawsuit against the State of Alabama that alleges the majority-white state legislature violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act when it passed a law overturning majority-black Birmingham’s raising of the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour.
In Durham, North Carolina, Elk writes for The Guardian about the movement to push back against so-called “pre-emption laws” that block progressive enclaves in the South from enacting higher minimum wages law. He looks at how and why the Fight for $15 is starting to invest in organizing poor rural Southern whites in North Carolina.