The Desert Springs contract had now expired. This was a big deal. Under U.S. labor law, when a contract expires, four dangerous things happen: workers can strike; the employer can lock workers out; the employer can stop collecting union membership dues from the workers’ paychecks; and the “permanent window” period for decertifying the union begins. Read More
AlterNet has published excerpts from my book Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement. Read the excerpts over at AlterNet, I’ve reposted them below. Read More
Bill Fletcher and I were talking about the analysis and the coverage of labor’s defeat in the Wisconsin recall effort. After we each read some back and forth in The Nation, we decided to jump into the fray to call out the central issue of the lack of radical political education inside today’s unions. Read More
The following was released on The Nation. No one wants to dwell on the faults of a successful campaign. Featuring mass celebrity arrests and dramatic images of thousands encircling the White House, last year’s struggle to halt the Keystone XL pipeline has come to be regarded as a model of progressive activism in the Obama era. Read More
The labor-environmental partnership, or, more colloquially, the blue-green alliance, has fallen into a state of disrepair. Even though pro-union environmentalists and a few unions worked together to fight the Keystone XL pipeline, the two camps ultimately remain divided, to their own detriment. In this episode of Nation Conversations, Jane McAlevey joins executive editor Betsy Reed to identify the failings of both sides and the types of solidarity that could help them combine forces. Read More