“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.”
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.
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.
Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh’s veto of $15 an hour minimum wage shows that the corporate wing of the Democratic Party is still very much alive and willing to take votes against worker’s interests.
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – “No, no. He’s got to go,” shouts a crowd of 75 mostly white-haired protesters wearing white #LetsTalkMo shirts in front of the…
Since 2015, chemical safety activists had warned officials in the Obama Administration that if they didn’t quickly finish rulemaking on the EPA’s Inherently Safer Technology workplace-safety standard that an incoming Republican administration could block the rule from taking effect. Now, it seems their worst nightmare is coming true.
Payday Senior Labor Reporter Mike Elk teamed up with the Guardian to cover the historic “March on Mississippi” against Nissan.
“You need a combination of all the grassroots and the grasstops moving in unison. The truth is that leaders don’t lead, they follow,” says Geevarghese. “With Ellison as the deputy chair, he will get into the streets. He will help harness grassroots anger, and Perez will help move that within the Democratic Party.”
Treder says that he did not see Honeywell making significantly more concessions after Honeywell and Teamsters Local 1185, which represents 976 Honeywell workers in Minneapolis, settled on the contract in early February.