Hold Fast

Following last week’s violent police crackdown, the Occupy Oakland General Assembly passed a resolution calling for a general strike on November 2nd. You can watch a video of the Oakland General Assembly voting to pass the general strike here. While general strikes are rare and hard to enact, this one is gaining steam. The International [...]

[Read more →]

In The Nation, Dana Goldstein has a really great review of Steven Brill’s new book, Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools. Brill has historically been a big supporter of Michelle Rhee and other education activists whose reforms always seem to center around busting teacher’s unions. Goldstein spends much of the review pointing [...]

[Read more →]

This is a great video of striking Verizon workers speaking about why they’re out on strike and what the strike means to them. It’s clear that these are smart, savvy, informed union members. The workers in this video are just a few of the 45,000+ Verizon workers of the CWA and IBEW who are out [...]

[Read more →]

The New York Times has an outrageous story about how courts in Minnesota and Colorado have ruled it permissible for state governments to cut public worker pensions and retired workers have no recourse to sue to keep the benefits that they negotiated and have been promised for years. Dean Baker has a good response to [...]

[Read more →]

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is giving a big speech today on the economy, the American Dream and labor’s independence from political parties. In it, he says: From the beginning of this country, through our efforts and our ideas, working people have made the American Dream real. And what is that dream? It is the idea [...]

[Read more →]

Mike Konczal at Rortybomb runs with some of Stephen Lerner’s ideas about homeowner organizing. Collective bargaining is the cure to this kind of power differential – give consumers access to the same expertise that businesses would draw on in these circumstances. Explicit in unions are that a small fee up front gets you full representation [...]

[Read more →]

At TomDispatch.com, Rebecca Solnit has an incredibly thoughtful essay on the nature of tipping points and revolutions, specifically through the change movements we’ve seen around the world in the last three months, as well as historical looks at revolutionary movements going back two hundred years in history. Along the way she connects movements in Egypt, [...]

[Read more →]

Awesome.

[Read more →]

Mike Konczal has a rough transcript, starting about 45 seconds in: Representative Barca:  Excuse me, Mr. Chairman I have a question about the open meeting rule being violated…Most importantly, before we even get started, obviously I’m going to want to have a summary of this bill from our director Lane, so I understand what’s in [...]

[Read more →]

Andy Kroll of Mother Jones has a must-read account of the ongoing fight between workers and GOP Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin. It’s a step-by-step walk through of Walker’s actions, labor’s responses, and how people moved into the streets to protest Walker’s attacks on unions. If you haven’t been paying attention, this is a good [...]

[Read more →]