Exclusively in the new print issue of CounterPunch
HOLLYWOOD AND THE CIA — Film historian Ed Rampell details Hollywood’s entangled relationship with the CIA and the Pentagon; HOUSES OF THE DEAD: Nancy Kurshan exposes the cruel human rights offenses taking place inside America’s vast gulag of Control Unit Prisons; BROTHERHOOD OF SUMMER: David Macaray charts the history of the most powerful union in the US: the Baseball Players Association; TAR SANDS COME TO AMERICA: Steve Horn explains how the Keystone Pipeline debates have diverted attention from Big Oil’s other plans to transport Alberta’s oil into the US. PLUS: Jeffrey St. Clair on CONSTITUTIONAL ENTROPY; Mike Whitney on HOW THE BANKS TARGETED BLACKS; Chris Floyd on THE RISE OF BRITAIN’S TEA PARTY; Kristin Kolb on THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE; Kim Nicolini on the FILMS OF WILLIAM FRIEDKIN; and Lee Ballinger on POETS VS. THE ONE PERCENT.
Archives by Tag 'unions'
In April, 43,000 Kaiser Permanente workers in California will vote, again, to decide which union will represent them, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) or the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), the latter now allied with the California Nurs...
By now, everyone knows that the AFL-CIO has spent tens of millions of dollars and thousands of hours trying to get Walmart’s hourly employees to join the union (some union, any union). Their organizing drive was smart, well-conceived, and timely. Seemi...
Who is to blame for organized labor’s descent in political irrelevancy? Ronald Reagan? The Koch brothers? Good answers, but maybe we need to look at labor leaders themselves.
Consider the case of this year’s mayor’s race in New York City, one of the last bast...
“The union is like having herpes. It doesn’t kill you, but it’s unpleasant and inconvenient, and it stops a lot of people from becoming your lover.”
John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market
Whole Foods Market (WFM) ...
Women. Gays. African-Americans. All are groups whose historical and contemporary injustices have mobilized America’s liberal base. President Obama offered acknowledgement in his second inaugural and even a few historical allusions, mentioning “Seneca Falls, Se...
Earlier this week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual summary of unionization in the U.S. It reports that in 2012, the union-membership rate of wage and salary workers was 11.3 percent, compared with 11.8 percent in 2011. The trend has been downward for so...
The attacks on the public domain, particularly public education, social services, and the public sector unions that are linked to these services, are coming in rapid-fire succession, sometimes in an overwhelming barrage where the victims have little time to comprehend wha...
What would a country without unions look like? Before answering, we should clarify labor’s role, both historically and presently. The purpose of a labor union is and always has been to raise the standard of living for working people. Simple as that. And by “...
American labor is in crisis. This is no news to people who have been paying attention—the passage of Michigan’s ‘right to work’ bill last week makes it the ...
When you examine the history of organized labor—the birth, growth, trajectory—you have to be shocked and mortified by what just happened to the great state of Michigan. They went from being one of the strongest, most celebrated union bastions in the country (the UAW...
Union protesters in front of the Michigan Capitol today knocked down an enormous tent erected by Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-brothers-funded group that helped bring right to work to the state. State troopers arriving on horseback were helpless, br...
In his recent New York Times op-ed piece, Princeton professor and regular columni...
When the story first broke, when those 800 members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 63 Office Clerical Unit walked off their jobs and effectively shut down the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, it was treated by the media as your stereoty...
I long ago rejected the “great man” theory of history. The people we elevate to heroic status get there mostly because they were in the right place at the right time. When the planets align just so, history-making moments arrive: an iconic event like th...
It’s such a disappointment when a writer or entertainer we like and admire says or does something that not only disappoints or confuses us, but offends us. His or her personal philosophy shouldn’t enter into it, but it does. Intellectually, we know we shouldn’t mix ...
After suffering almost two years of ramped up union-busting, the labor movement came out swinging in the recent elections. It swung its hardest in swing states like Ohio , delivering the 2012 presidential election to President Obama and propelling other labor-endorsed ca...
The AFL-CIO and most member unions went all-out for Obama, doing their usual get-out-the-vote phone banking, canvassing, and radio advertising. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) put 100,000 volunteers in the field the last few days of the campaign. Labor’...
In May of 2012, Mitt Romney made his now famous 47% speech to a secret group of very wealthy donors. In this presentation, we see the “Romney Doctrine” in full relief. In fact, we rarely, (perhaps never), have seen a more open class analysis of our country made by a p...
For some time now, Labor has been punched into a corner when it comes to state legislation. Over the last two years legislation has been passed in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan that has attempted to gut largely public workers of their union rights.
In addi...
Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) organizer Brandon Johnson, who is a black man, recently spoke about a conversation he had with veteran black educator Dr. Grady Jordan about racism in the schools today. Jordan told him, “Black teachers fought hard. This is a direct retaliat...
California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) has four medical campuses in San Francisco and is the city’s second largest private employer with 6000 employees and “over 1500 doctors and allied health practitioners.” It is owned by Sutter Health, a huge healthcare provide...
America’s growing workforce of home-based care-givers has provided the labor movement with its main source of recent membership growth, in a period of overall union decline.
Some of these gains were rolled back last year in states like Wisconsin, Ohio, and Mic...
Legendary political satirist Mort Sahl (whom I’ve interviewed) used to tell this joke: “If President Nixon saw a drowning man 20-feet from shore, he would throw him a 15-foot rope. Then Henry Kissinger would go on television and solemnly announce that the presiden...
Among the many myths and outright lies being circulated about labor unions (e.g., union members can’t be fired, they are inferior workers, it was union wages that forced companies to relocate overseas, etc.), one of the most annoying and downright offensive is the Myth ...
We were having a conversation in the teachers’ room and discussing the Chicago teachers’ strike and remarking on how the politicians and the media tried to bully the Chicago teachers with all this talk about how they were harming the interest of their st...