These are the Secretary of Labor’s prepared remarks. He apparently diverged in some instances from these prepared remarks in reaction to the very enthused response from the crowd at the convention. _________________________ Good morning, brothers and sisters! What a great honor to be here with this extraordinary gathering of dedicated and powerful champions for working…
At the outset, I want to apologize if I have gotten any of the details of this story wrong. It’s very complex, and I have had to piece it together from a number of sources. The Adjunct Faculty Association had not gone on strike since 1982. The Taylor Law makes public-employee strikes illegal in New…
I received the following e-mail yesterday afternoon: ________________________ Martin, last night the NRA successfully recalled two Colorado state senators who had voted to pass good gun safety laws. Democrats had more money and district demographics were in their favor. But the election came down to turnout and Republicans had more intensity and more reliable voters. The biggest challenge facing…
Statement by President Lyndon Johnson, Labor Day, 1968. THE TRADEMARK of the American labor movement has long been an unyielding stand for individual dignity and economic justice. On this Labor Day, with employment hitting an all-time peak of almost 78 million and a record proportion of citizens sharing in our Nation’s vast wealth, this stand…
What follows is the press release of President Obama’s Labor Day address. It is full of nice sentiments amorphously framed. How does a Democratic president deliver make a statement commemorating Labor Day without ever using any of the following words: “union,” “bargaining unit,” “organized labor,” or even “labor.” During the Democratic Convention in 2012, the…
This letter was sent by the Steering Committee of the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education to the leadership of the faculty bargaining unit at the City College of San Francisco after the regional accreditation agency announced that the college had not made sufficient progress toward correcting the deficiencies identified by the accreditation team…
Note: On Monday of this week I posted an article about plans to cut 40 jobs, including 22 faculty members at Clarion University of Pennsylvania. Earlier today, I posted another article on the situation at Clarion on Raging Chicken Press. This article features an interview with the President of the Clarion chapter of the faculty…
Note: This article was published earlier today on Raging Chicken Press. An excerpt appears below. You can read the full article by clicking the link at the end, or you can go to the original article now by clicking here. Last week, Clarion University announced what it called a “bold, ambitious workforce plan” that will…
Certainly since Lyndon Johnson pushed through the social safety-net programs known collectively as the Great Society, but even since FDR began to create the first of those safety-net programs as part of his New Deal, the Far Right has been arguing vehemently that such programs are tantamount to communism, that they represent an unethical and…
Loss of Employment in Manufacturing before and during the Great Recession The following chart shows the loss of manufacturing jobs, by state, in the decade between 1996 to 2005. The right-to-work state are indicated in boldface type. States with a Loss of More than 20 Percent of Their Employment in Manufacturing: Alabama 74,900…