Troublemakers Blog
September 03, 2010 /
Ed Sadlowski came very close to winning the presidency of the Steelworkers in 1977, running a campaign that galvanized rank-and-filers. Now "Oil Can Eddie" is in California, volunteering on the campaign of the National Union of Healthcare Workers to unseat the Service Employees at Kaiser Permanente—an effort to represent more than 43,000 workers.
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September 03, 2010 /
What part of “NO” doesn’t Justin Norman understand? The CEO of JD Norman Industries is pleading with GM workers to accept his offer of a 50 percent pay cut—though they'd just booed his buddies off the stage two days before.
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September 02, 2010 / Jane Slaughter
It’s 12 feet long, with a tail, claws, and sharp teeth. It’s only a gray balloon, but the rat strikes fear in the hearts of New York City building managers.
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September 01, 2010 / Tiffany Ten Eyck
Forty-seven years after Martin Luther King, Jr. uttered the words “I have a dream” to an overflow crowd on the Washington Mall, August 28 still has resonance for civil rights activists, the union movement, and, now, the Tea Party.
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August 31, 2010 / Mark Brenner
Domestic workers gathered at the foot of the Harriet Tubman memorial in Harlem today to celebrate New York’s groundbreaking domestic workers legislation, which the governor signed into law at a nearby community center. Deloris Wright told the crowd of fellow domestic workers, supporters, and reporters, “Today is about generations of domestic workers that came »
August 26, 2010 / Mischa Gaus
Two brothers who own four LA car washes were sentenced to a year in jail last week and ordered to pay workers $1.25 million. The verdict came after a plea agreement that settled 172 charges of criminal and labor-law violations, and shows the increasing heft of a long-running Steelworkers campaign to organize car-wash workers in the city.
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August 25, 2010 / Tiffany Ten Eyck
A 17-state bus tour is the keystone of “The Job’s Not Done," a ramping up of efforts by the Blue Green Alliance—a coalition of labor and environmental players including the Steelworkers—to get the Senate to take up a comprehensive climate change bill to provide funding for jobs in new energy technologies.
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August 23, 2010 /
Twenty-five years ago this month, the small town of Austin, Minnesota, captured the national imagination as 1,700 meatpacking workers struck the flagship plant of George A. Hormel and Company. The strike of Food and Commercial Workers Local P-9 touched a raw nerve in communities and workplaces nationwide struggling to confront corporate demands to extract deep »
August 20, 2010 / Tiffany Ten Eyck
August 16, 2010 / Tiffany Ten Eyck
UAW International representatives intent on cutting GM workers’ wages in half were met with a roaring reception—of boos—in Indianapolis Sunday. Unable to make themselves heard over the shouts of “traitor!” and more from the standing-room-only crowd of stamping plant workers, a rep finally asked, “Are there members who want to hear this information?” “NO!” was »