The Democratic Party in Chicago is at war. The one party town is seeing an important element of the coalition on strike. Rahm Emanuel is at war with a real adversary: teacher’s union boss Karen Lewis. Last year Lewis began laying the groundwork for a strike as witnessed in this Chicago Magazine interview with reporter Carol Felsenthal: read more »
labor unions
The Last Stop in Brooklyn
Getting out was essential but I was stuck in Brooklyn until I could plot my escape…
There was no such thing as “diversity” in white, working-class Bensonhurst in the 1950s. Only the Jews and the Italians.
My tribe descending from Yiddish-speaking East European immigrants who settled in cramped tenements and worked in the schmatta trade of Manhattan’s lower east side. read more »
All in the Family, 2011
We overheard this phone conversation recently between tea party activist Bill Francis and his 19-year-old daughter and Wall Street occupier Serena:
Bill: I understand why you’re protesting but I think you’re missing the point.
Serena: What’s that?
Bill: You’re mad at rich people and upset that you can’t get a job.
Serena: True.
Bill: And you think that by camping out on the street you’ll get attention? read more »
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Labor’s End?
Remember cigar-smoking union leaders, those portly white guys who sat around the pool at AFL-CIO conventions in Miami Beach?
We called them the “old guard” and blamed them for allowing what looked at the time to be a very foreboding decline in union density, power and influence.
When I started in the Labor Movement in the 1980s, the struggle to replace that generation with smart, progressive and militant leadership was well underway. read more »