By Mike Elk The Avoidable Disaster This week, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms ruled that the 2013 West, Texas chemical and fertilizer explosion, which killed 15, was caused by an intentional criminal act. The investigators ruled that the perpetrator set off a fire in a seed bin near

By Mike Elk. Originally published on March 13, 2014 at In These Times. 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

Welcome to the first unionized digital labor news co-op in the South, founded by former POLITICO Senior Labor Reporter Mike Elk and labor folk musician and Railroad Workers United Co-Chair J.P. Wright. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union membership in the South last year increased by nearly