First, we must recognize that the overwhelming vote against the union in Bessemer marks a decisive defeat, not to be under estimated. It will undoubtedly have a dampening effect on other workers, especially given its broad media attention, and the high expectations of many.
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Workers at Amazon’s distribution center in Bessemer, Alabama are voting in a historic union election — whether to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). This is a mail-in NLRB ballot that will end on March 29. Last month, we discovered that, starting in January, Amazon had hired two prominent anti-union consultants, Russell Brown and Melissa Smith of Florida-based Road Warrior Productions (RWP), to assist with its campaign against the RWDSU.
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News that hopeful immigrants continue to be transported across the border under the Biden administration at levels last reached in 2018 makes it clear that the early weeks of the new administration will not bring a policy sea-change. And it makes the essays in the new issue of Labor 18:1, which discuss elements of U.S.
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12 Facts About Morgan Lewis, Amazon’s Powerful Anti-Union Law Firm
Unless the NLRB upholds Amazon’s recent appeal of a mail-in ballot, almost 6000 Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama (BHM1), which opened in last spring, will vote on whether or not to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) between February 8 and March 29, 2021.
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As we anticipate new political chances of addressing impediments to workers power, we offer this video of a webinar that took place on October 19, 2020 with LAWCHA members Jon E. Bekken, Albright College, David Hamilton Golland, Governors State University, Nelson Ouellet, Université de Moncton, Naomi R Williams, Rutgers University.
This post was originally published in 2013.
Today, Christmas Eve, 2013, marks the 100-year anniversary of the Italian Hall Tragedy in Calumet, Michigan, one of the most tragic events in American labor history.
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Jonathan Daniel Wells’ The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War exposes the role of Wall Street, powerful judges, politicians, lawyers and police officers in kidnapping African-Americans and sending them South to enslavement, showing the way that New York’s powerful kept slavery and the slave trade alive.
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Nat LaCour connected civil rights unionism to teachers’ struggle to build union democracy. A remembrance and evaluation.
The United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO) defy assumptions about anti-union right-to-work Louisiana. As a small, mostly segregated Black local, in 1966, they held the first teachers strike in the South.
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We are glad to take this article from behind a paywall link at the Labor: Studies in Working Class History, and are grateful that Duke University Press will make it free for the next two months. And we are grateful that the authors, Gordon Mantler and Rachel Riedner, have provided an update for us.
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Showtime’s The Good Lord Bird uses the events around John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry to weave a fictional tale incorporating some basic insights and arguments about the nature of race in America. It did its most impressive work in presenting the wide spectrum of diverse African American responses to slavery and, in the process, offering a better sense of their humanity.
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