April 8, 2022

Happening right here on our DMV turf, the trend of organizing union formations in the nonprofit/think tank sector is emerging as MSM news in POLITICO.

But, says Binyamin Appelbaum in the NYT, “The number of American workers who are represented by unions drops with almost every passing year. It reached a new low last year. And it will not recover unless and until the federal government changes the rules of the game.” In the midst of the euphoria about a win at Amazon, “The People, United, Are Not Going to Get Very Far.”

Steven Greenhouse, writing about US labor forces in the UK’s The Guardian, forecasts, “Union leaders see two parallel strategies to preserve American democracy — one is to battle against efforts that roll back voting rights, reduce the political voice of minorities and enable hyper-partisans to skew, even overturn vote counts. The other strategy is to ensure that Democrats win key battleground states, especially longtime union strongholds Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.” Can the numbers needed on the street come from old-school AFL-CIO strategies? Less hope, more help will improve the odds … ‘January 6 Was a Real Wake-Up Call’: US Unions Fight To Save Democracy

A recent webinar, sponsored by US Labor Against War, with Elise Bryant, Phyllis Bennis, Bill Fletcher Jr. and Sara Nelson, provides an in-depth discussion of the Ukraine war and its implication for working-class struggles. The video, edited to incorporate the slide show at the start, is now posted for public viewing on YouTube. 

New York Magazine profiles the increasingly ubiquitous economist Adam Tooze: “To challenge decades of economic orthodoxy urging government thrift and free markets, it helps to have someone with the data to back up John Maynard Keynes’s assertion that “anything we can actually do, we can afford.” A figure like Sanders could make the case that things had to change, but a figure like Tooze could provide the proof.”

In Vice, labor journalist Lauren Kaori Gurley chronicles the highlight of last week, the worker-led Amazon Labor Union’s unionization victory in Staten Island — from ALU President Chris Smalls’ unfair termination two years ago to the grassroots organizing that led to today. 

NLRA general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo yesterday issued a memo announcing that she will ask the Board to rule that mandatory meetings, including captive audience meetings, are a violation of the National Labor Relations Act. In The American Prospect, journalist Harold Meyerson explains why she is “in such a blessed hurry” to reverse decades of erosion of the protections enshrined in the National Labor Relations Act.

“… if housing is a human right as HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge says, the government should be enabling community control of the housing market, not corporate control. The so-called market can only be relied upon to prioritize profits, not human rights.” A call for social housing from Portside.