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.
With workers having already successfully won first contracts at Vice and Gawker, perhaps a second wave of digital media unionization is about to begin at more mainstream media outlets. However, workers at those publications face far steeper odds, as the outlets tend to be owned by corporations that have deeper pockets and are less worried about the backlash of left-leaning readers.
“With Joe Biden, we had a messenger boy. With someone like Tom Perez, we would finally have a Vice President, who would know how to get stuff done for labor within the White House,” one top labor official privy to discussions within the AFL-CIO told Payday Report.
“It could really shake things up,” IWW organizer Jimi Del Duca told me. “A lot of working class people are afraid to organize because they have a few crumbs to lose. [Many] prisoners have nothing to lose and that gives them courage. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain.”
By Mike Elk Payday Report has learned that New York City based Teamsters Local 805 leader Sandy Pope has agreed to join the slate of…
“My grandfather was there when the union first started in 1936. My dad has been there for twenty years,” says 20-year-old Honeywell worker Brandon Bullerman. “Then I get there and the company just eliminated 60 years of my family’s progress.”
“It is an outrage and a mark on this Administration,” said Gerald Poje, a former member of the federal Chemical Safety Board. “We are asking the Obama Administration to step up and protect the American public in ways that are being mandated to protect the public of Afghanistan”.
During the nearly two years he worked at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., Ed Hunter, 43, spent his days bent over, crawling in and out of cars on the assembly line. He believes the posture slowly destroyed his body and led to an accident he suffered in June 2011. “When I got into the car I felt something go,” he says. “I just lost my foot—I couldn’t feel it.”