NewsTrust - Labor - Most Recent Stories: News (Independent)

Unrest mounts as China mine death rises

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Manila Times - Nov. 23 (News Report) - Relatives of victims angrily demanded answers Monday as hopes of finding more survivors after China’s worst mining disaster for two years took a blow with the death toll rising to 104. Rescuers recovered 12 more bodies, a spokesman for the mine in northeastern China’s Heilongjiang province said, leaving four miners still unaccounted for after the weekend blast.

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Anti-Statism In America

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New Republic - By John B. Judis - Nov. 11 (News Analysis) - Liberals and progressives have fared poorly in the face of this staunch anti-statist tradition, but there have still been periods when they have broken through and enacted major reforms--during Woodrow Wilson’s first term, Franklin Roosevelt’s first term, Lyndon Johnson’s first two years, and Richard Nixon’s first term. They succeeded for different reasons at different times, but several conditions recur.

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Calderon Tries to Turn Out the Lights on Mexico's Unions

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Michael E. Miller - Oct. 16 (News Report) - Every Monday morning for the last 23 years, Ernesto arrived at Luz y Fuerza del Centro, Mexico City's power and light company, ready to work. This Monday, however, he arrived ready to protest.

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Real "Norma Rae" Dies of Cancer After Insurer Delayed Treatment

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Sue Sturgis - Sep. 16 (News Report) - The North Carolina union organizer who was the inspiration for the movie "Norma Rae" died on Friday of brain cancer after a battle with her insurance company, which delayed her treatment. She was 68.

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Party Is Such Sweet Sorrow

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Sep. 04 (News Analysis) - During the past year, Republicans have frequently said they want to work with Democrats. But the real story of the last few months is how unserious those pledges turned out to be. Although you wouldn’t know it from their rhetoric or the media coverage, there are not one but two ostensibly bipartisan proposals out there right now. Either of them could be the template for successful reform if even a few Republicans started pushing them seriously. But, even the ostensibly reasonable Republican senators whom Democrats have tried to engage--Mike Enzi, Charles Grassley, and Hatch--just aren’t interested. And it appears they haven’t been for a while.

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The Courtship

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Gabriel Sherman - Aug. 31 (Special Report) - In the spring of 2005, New York Times columnist David Brooks arrived at then-Senator Barack Obama’s office for a chat. Brooks, a conservative writer who joined the Times in 2003 from The Weekly Standard, had never met Obama before. But, as they chewed over the finer points of Edmund Burke, it didn’t take long for the two men to click. “I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” Brooks recently told me, “but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me.”

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There Are More Slaves Today Than at Any Time in Human History

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Terrence McNally - Aug. 25 (Special Report) - One hundred forty-three years after passage of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and 60 years after Article 4 of the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights banned slavery and the slave trade worldwide, there are more slaves than at any time in human history -- 27 million. Today’s slavery focuses on big profits and cheap lives. It is not about owning people like before, but about using them as completely disposable tools for making money.

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Labor Warns Dems: We'll Sit Out Election If You Oppose Public Plan

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Sam Stein - Aug. 18 (News Report) - "We'll look at every one of their votes," Trumka said after his speech at the Netroots Nation convention. "If they're against the Employee Free Choice Act, if they're against health care for that reason, I think it'll be tough for them to get support from working people."

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Wall St. Rally Masks Deeper Problems

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Consortium News - By Paul Jay, Richard Wolff - Jul. 28 (News Analysis) - Wolff says the improved corporate balance sheets have resulted more from laying off workers and reducing costs than in selling more products and raising revenues. Workers have been forced to make concessions, but that decreases chances for a healthy recovery, he says.

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Rite Aid Workers Fight for a Union

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Angel Warner, Ken Silverstein, Amy Goodman - Jun. 25 (Special Report) - Ahead of congressional debates on the Employee Free Choice Act, or EFCA, we take a look at a long struggle of over 600 Rite Aid workers in California to form a union. The workers are based in Lancaster, California, at the Southwest distribution center for the nation’s third largest drugstore. After a two-year struggle, a majority of Rite Aid workers at the site voted to join the International Longshore Workers Local 26. The story has gained national attention and focused attention in the fight over the Employee Free Choice Act. We speak with a Rite Aid worker and with Ken Silverstein about his article in Harper’s Magazine, “Labor’s Last Stand: The Corporate Campaign to Kill the Employee Free Choice Act.”

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Labor's last stand: The corporate campaign to kill the Employee Free Choice Act

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Harper's - By Ken Silverstein - Jun. 24 (Special Report) - (subscribers only for full article, see link.) THE BUSINESS LOBBY HAS FRAMED ITS OPPOSITION TO EFCA AROUND THE “SECRET BALLOT” AND LABOR “COERCION.” BUT THE CURRENT RULES GIVE EMPLOYERS A CHOKEHOLD OVER UNION ELECTIONS

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Foreign workers for U.S. are casualties twice over

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

ProPublica - By T. Christian Miller - Jun. 21 (Special Report) - Rey Torres dreamed of a better life for his wife and five children when he left a neighborhood of wooden shacks and burning trash piles to drive a bus on a U.S. military base near Baghdad. He hoped to send his children to college and build a new home with the $16,000 a year he earned in Iraq -- four times what he could make in the Philippines. Then, in April 2005, Torres, 31, was killed in an ambush by Iraqi insurgents. His widow and children were supposed to be protected by a war zone insurance system overseen by the U.S. government. They were eligible for about $300,000 in compensation.

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Oceans in Deep Trouble, Congress Told

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

courthousenews.com - Jun. 18 (News Report) - As the globe begins to fry, ocean acidification threatens many of the finned species with extinction along with destruction of the $111 billion in economic trade that comes from the ocean, legislators were told last week by a host of witnesses, including the descendant of famed oceanographer Jaques-Yves Cousteau.

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Unions Embrace Street Corner Solidarity

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Inter Press Service - By Peter Costantini - Jun. 08 (Special Report) - For Pablo Alvarado, the genesis occurred back in 1999 when janitors in Los Angeles were on strike. Some of the cleaning companies came to the corners and workers' centres where day labourers gathered and tried to hire workers to cross the janitors' picket lines, he recounted to IPS. "The workers said 'Thanks, but no thanks, we won't do that.' And instead 260 day labourers joined 2,000 janitors who marched across the landscape of Los Angeles," he said.

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Hope for Pakistan's child workers

Wed, 13 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

GlobalPost - By Sarah Stuteville - May. 13 (News Report) - A Karachi-based group bent on eradicating child labor is offering school lessons outside their working hours.

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No Country for Middle-Aged Men

Sat, 09 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Sasha Abramsky - May. 09 (Special Report) - Tom Hazel worked for three decades in a blazing hellhole to get his pension. But the financial geniuses who took over his plant had other ideas.

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Bankrupt Bailout Spends Billions to Shut Factories

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By John Nichols - May. 04 (News Analysis) - Chrysler is planning to shift work done in some of those plants to new factories being built outside the United States. So the auto bailout that was supposed to keep U.S. workers on the job is instead providing taxpayer dollars to companies that plan to shutter idle factories and lay off workers in the industrial Midwest while shifting work to other countries.

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The Great Autoworkers' Gamble

Sun, 03 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Consortium News - May. 03 (News Analysis) - New School economist Richard Wolff says the proposed restructuring is a bigger gamble for autoworkers who have agreed to trade their health care funds for risky shares in the revamped companies.

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Bayer safety lapses 'could have eclipsed Bhopal'

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

sundaygazettemail.com - By Ken Ward Jr. - Apr. 21 (Special Report) - Significant safety lapses by management of Bayer Cropscience's Institute plant caused a fatal August 2008 explosion that could have turned into a disaster worse than Bhopal, according to evidence presented Tuesday to a congressional committee.

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Canadian workers achieve first-ever contract at Wal-Mart

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

workdayminnesota.org - Apr. 15 (News Report) - Some 180 workers at the Wal-Mart store in Saint Hyacinthe, Quebec, became the first North American employees of the monster anti-union retailer to achieve a union contract. On April 8, the firm legally had to accept a contract with UFCW Canada Local 501, implemented by a neutral arbitrator. Wal-Mart – the world’s largest retailer – has fought unionization at its stores throughout North America through a variety of tactics.

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A tech labor shortage myth? Exploring the H-1B visa debate

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

seattlepi.com - Apr. 03 (Investigative Report) - Labor leaders and some experts contend that the high-tech labor shortage is a myth. "The industry claim to need H-1Bs to remedy a labor shortage is false. Their claim that the H-1Bs are 'the best and the brightest,' needed to keep American firms innovative, is also false in the vast majority of cases. Instead, the employers' goal is use H-1Bs as a source of cheap labor,"

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Microsoft asks for fewer visas, still supports lifting cap

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

seattlepi.com - Apr. 02 (Special Report) - Most of Microsoft's U.S. work force is American. About 10 percent of the work force is an H-1B visa holder, he said. Smith mentioned repeatedly that the number of visas the company is seeking is for a "small number of extraordinary talented individuals."

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The Crack-Up of Business's United Front Against the Employee Free Choice Act

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Art Levine - Mar. 24 (News Report) - On Monday, an unlikely new battle in the heated political war over The Employee Free Choice Act broke out: A fresh round of in-fighting among businesses over this major legislation that aims to give workers a level playing field to organize unions. The bill has been portrayed by Big Business as the apocalypse that would destroy a civilization. Now, however, big and small business leaders alike are taking aim at each other's views of the corporate hard-line opposition to the proposed legislation. The latest lightning-rod for controversy is a so-called "compromise" proposal floated in the last few days by leading retailers Starbucks, Costco and Whole Foods that they're billing as a "Third Way" approach that acknowledges the need for a "level playing field." But it actually guts two of the most critical elements of the Employee Free Choice bill: majority sign-up and mandated arbitration for employers who sabotage first-contract negotiations. Even so, by breaking ranks with the hard-line, vituperative corporate front groups that have demonized the bill, they've drawn outraged attacks from their Big Business allies, in part because they're essentially conceding that the current system isn't fair to workers. As The Hill and others have reported, the anti-union opposition machine kicked into action:

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Southern oligarchy and the labor unions

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

southernstudies.org - By Joseph B. Atkins - Mar. 13 (News Analysis) - It's at the epicenter of a sad class divide between a desperate, poorly educated workforce and a demagogic oligarchy, and it has been a demarcation line stronger than the Mason-Dixon in separating the region from the rest of the nation.

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Newly Formed 150,000-Strong Nurses' Union Pushes for Single-Payer Healthcare

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman, Geri Jenkins - Mar. 11 (Special Report) - Three of the country’s top organizations of direct care registered nurses have come together to form a new national nurses’ union that is advocating for a single-payer national health insurance program. The new union unifies the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, United American Nurses, and the Massachusetts Nurses Association into a 150,000-member association, making it the largest registered nurses union in US history.

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