posts categorized asLaborOnline Articles

Sharpen Your Pencils and Your Pitchforks

by on May 1, 2013

The battle against teachers and their unions seemed to crescendo last year during Chicago’s teacher strike.  The mainstream media had a field day blaming those “lazy teachers” and their “big unions” for the problems facing Chicago’s public school system, the nation and America’s ability to compete in the world.

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Workers’ Memorial Day Reflections

by on April 29, 2013

As I write this it’s Workers’ Memorial Day, an event that barely gets a blip on the media screens. But it brought to my mind one of the first union demonstrations I ever participated in, one that protested the decline in OSHA standards.

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President Obama’s Budget Proposal Addresses Wealth Inequality in America: Just Kidding

by on April 11, 2013

President Obama presented his budget proposal in the face of sequestration, the effects of which are slowly making their way into federal programs and offices around the country and the world.  Because proposals are just that, proposals — tentative imaginings of which directions the nation may choose to move, Obama’s concession to tie Social Security to chained CPI is troubling and suggests his willingness to further undermine the integrity of our social fabric.

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In Memoriam: Robert Chrisman

by on March 26, 2013

I first encountered The Black Scholar in the mid-1990s when I was an undergraduate seeking insight to the quandaries of campus race relations, a better comprehension of the conflicts internal to black student politics, and a more sophisticated way of understanding the duplicity of university administrators beyond just their racism.

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Bob Zieger, 1938-2013

by on March 7, 2013

LAWCHA mourns the loss of one of its founding members, Bob Zieger. Bob was one of LAWCHA’s first ever board members and has been with the organization since its founding in 1999. If you would like to contribute a remembrance, please send it to [email protected]

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The AFL-CIO and Keystone XL Pipeline

by on February 28, 2013

On Tuesday, the AFL-CIO Executive Council approved a Statement on Energy and Jobs that effectively endorsed the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. Technically, the resolution supported expanding the nation’s pipeline infrastructure, but this was an attempt to bypass outright support of a project that has attracted great criticism from the environmental community while dividing the federation’s constituent unions.

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