Union workers have been locked out at the uranium enrichment facility in Metropolis, Illinois for two months now after contract negotiations broke down over Honeywell's demand that workers give up their retiree health care coverage and pension plans. The Metropolis uranium facility is the only one in the United States that can convert U308 into the extremely deadly UF6.
Because the plant is the only conversion facility of its kind in the United States, familiarity with the Metropolis plant, and not just generic experience in the field, is essential to ensuring the plant's safety.
Washington - Watching the great civil rights march on television in August 1963, I couldn't help but notice that hundreds carried signs with a strange legend at the top: "UAW Says." UAW was saying "Segregation Disunites the United States," and many other things insisting on equality.
This "UAW" was a very odd word to my 11-year-old self and I asked my dad who or what "U-awe," as I pronounced it, was. The letters, he explained, stood for the United Auto Workers union.
Labor and Democratic Party leaders are concerned - and rightly so - that labor's rank and file may not turn out in November to support labor-friendly Democrats in the massive numbers that played a major role in the election of President Obama and Democratic Congressional majorities in 2008.
AFL-CIO officials are hoping to turn the anger and frustration that so many working people feel into votes, financial support and campaigning on behalf of pro-labor Democrats. But the officials worry about an "enthusiasm gap" among unionists and their supporters stemming from the relatively slow pace of the progressive economic and political changes that they had very much expected from Obama and the Congressional Democrats.
Tempestuous French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been in a tailspin in the polls in recent months and his turbulent way of trying to snap out of it was to rally the most conservative and xenophobic wing of his right-wing base with a series of moves over the summer that were sure to remind everybody who’s the toughest of them all on foreigners.
San Francisco - This Labor Day the faces in the streets in cities across the U.S. are those of hotel workers, picketing some of the world's most luxurious establishments. In San Francisco, cooks, room cleaners, housemen and laundry workers laid siege to the Downtown Hilton recently, demanding that the corporation negotiate a new contract with their union, UNITE HERE Local 2.
The Labor Department reports this morning that companies created ony 67,000 new jobs in August. That’s down from the 107,000 they created in July. And because the government laid off temporary Census workers, the economy as a whole lost 54,000 jobs.
To put this into perspective, we need 125,000 net new jobs a month just to keep up with the growth of the population and the potential workforce.
A new study about the effects of immigration on U.S. employment supports the long-standing arguments of immigration advocates: Rather than displacing American workers, immigrant labor actually makes our economy stronger. Kevin Drum has the details at Mother Jones.
It began on December 30, 1936, at Fisher Body No. 1 in Flint, Michigan: workers occupied General Motors factories, launching one of the key struggles in U.S. labor history. A Women's Emergency Brigade brought them food; when the police tried to drive out the strikers with tear gas, the women broke the windows to give them fresh air. After 44 bitter winter days, the sit-down strike forced GM to recognize their union, the United Auto Workers.
It was no accident that Flint was the scene of this historic battle.
