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…
In the non-stop, intensive media attention to the George Zimmerman murder trial, you may have missed another court decision, one with perhaps equally broad, if not as deadly, implications for ordinary Americans. The Iowa Supreme Court upheld a dentist’s decision to fire his dental hygienist because she was so attractive as to be “irresistible” and…
Shortly after I made yesterday’s post, I received an e-mail from the group trying to galvanize broader support for higher pay for workers at McDonald’s and other fast-food restaurants: http://lowpayisnotok.org/mcdonalds/?utm_campaign=LowPay&utm_medium=email&utm_source=McDonalds. At the center of the page is a link to a video at the McDonald’s corporate website, ostensibly provided as a service to their employees…
The post to which this is a postscript is available at: https://academeblog.org/2013/07/10/coal-miners-get-the-shaft-again/ Lest anyone think that what Peabody Energy and Arch Coal are doing through Patriot Coal is an anomaly in the Appalachian coal fields, let me draw your attention to the career of Don Blankenship. From 1992 to 2010, Blankenship headed Massey Energy in…