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.

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.

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.

Two recent stories in the bastions of mainstream media draw attention to the study of capitalism and Marx. That’s all to the good, even if  the articles treat this like a fashion trend.

As the president of the US announces new historical monuments, ranging from Harriet Tubman to 240,000 acres of land in New Mexico, it is a moment for each of us to remember how workers history is ignored and how we need to stop being academics and become organizers to promote it.

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.

Over his three terms as elected President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez has been much demonized in the U.S. and international press that backs the powerful minority within Venezuela that has resisted the new path repeatedly chosen by the voters of that country.

As LAWCHA members know, contemporary unionism is almost invisible—union members usually don’t show T-shirts or bumper stickers and certainly  not yard signs proclaiming “Proud Union Family.” Union  history is equally uncelebrated so each of us needs to promote public displays of the movement’s history.

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.