The Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010, also known as Obamacare, presents challenges to the multiemployer plans through which some unions bargain collectively to provide health care insurance for their members.  These plans, often called Taft Hartley Plans, currently cover about 26 million workers, families, and retirees.  Unless there is a major regulatory change made by [...]

   16 arrested in Charleston, WV Charleston,West Virginia. April 1, 2013.  They boarded buses and cars before dawn, some the night before, coming from the coalfields of Illinois,Pennsylvania,Kentucky,Virginia,Ohio,Indiana, and all acrossWest Virginia.  By10:00 AM over 7,000 had packed into the giant Charleston Civic Center to voice their support for the 23,000 miners and their families who face [...]

Coal execs deserve “a cell next to Bernie Madoff”  St. Louis,MO. February 13, 2013.  Shirley Inman was arrested for peaceful, civil disobedience as she protested at the Peabody Energy headquarters against the corporate threat to rob miners and their families of the health benefits they have earned.  Inman, a member of United Mine Workers of America Local 2286 in [...]

 In his recent proposal, President Obama included a change in the cost of living adjustment (COLA) that will make cuts in Social Security benefits.  Ugly, hurtful cuts.  This COLA cut is called Chained CPI .  It would do real damage by changing the formula used to calculate the COLA.  It’s a real and harmful cut to the [...]

The solution is Improved Medicare for All After the November election, there will be a major effort in Congress to pass a budget deal that will make cuts in Social Security, raise the Medicare and Social Security eligibility age, and perhaps more–unless we act to stop it with a solution that is close at hand.  There [...]

The workers at Lockheed Martin in Fort Worth, Texas, are a spunky, tenacious bunch.  Amidst a recession with sky high jobless rates, many workers only dream of taking on the company to stop concessions.  Some have the courage to fight.     These 3,600 workers, members of District Lodge 776 , International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW), [...]

When EGT, an international corporate behemoth, threatened to break their union in Longview, Washington, members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and their friends from the community organized a massive demonstration, sat down on the tracks and stopped a train.  They did it more than once.  The nation’s workers took heart at this [...]

On Thursday, October 13, 2011, union supporters and Occupy Louisville protesters gathered in Jefferson Square Park for a joint rally. This park at 6th and Jefferson is the location for the Louisville version of Occupy Wall Street where hundreds have gathered daily. The unions were there to support Occupy Louisville and also to push for an ordinance [...]

On September 27, 2011, in over 300 cities, postal workers will rally their communities to save the US postal services.  Letter carrier Michael Plaskon has written a short essay to help us to understand the effort to destroy this public service so that it can be privatized for profit.   What’s the real story behind the postal crisis? [...]

In 2009 when the Washington beltway was tied up with the health care reform tussle, Montana Democratic Senator Max Baucus , chairman of the all powerful Senate Finance Committee, said everything was on the table–except for single payer.  When doctors, nurses and others rose in his hearing to insist that single payer be included in the debate, Baucus [...]

Detroit Diesel has been around since April 1937, a few months after the Flint sit down strike that won union recognition.  This year, 1,100 retired auto workers at Detroit Diesel suffered a giant cut in company provision of health benefits because their Voluntary Employees Benefits Association, VEBA, went belly up.  Workers who retired between 1993 [...]

In a message to the All Unions Committee for Single Payer Health Care—HR 676, Jim Cavanaugh, President of the South Central Federation of Labor (SCFL), said:  ”For at least three decades now the working class has been under severe attack.  In Madison, and throughout Wisconsin, we have declared that enough is enough and now is [...]