In These Times

Stephanie Bates (C) and Hannah Sassaman (R) join the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in a protest march against Burger King November 30, 2007 in Miami, Fla.   (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

By Emily Udell

Farmworkers in South Florida took to the streets over the weekend as part of a continued campaign to convince the state’s largest grocer to pay a penny more per pound for their tomatoes.

Hundreds of members of the Coalition of the Immokalee Workers and their supporters demonstrated for nearly five hours on Sunday to ask Publix to help improve wages and conditions for Florida farmworkers. Protesters carried signs bearing messages like “End the Poverty” and “Publix: Where the Harvest of Shames Continues.” (Here’s a photo gallery from the protest.)

The coalition began writing letters earlier this year, urging Publix to work with the coalition to improve conditions for the workers who supply the tomatoes they sell. Last weekend’s protest in Lakeland, Fla.—where the grocer is headquartered—was the latest in a series of demonstrations in front of the company’s stores.

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By Art Levine

Moderate, conservative and even some liberal Senators moved away Monday from the Senate leadership's already-modest public option to faux  "compromise" proposals that would leave private insurance companies in charge of any health reforms.

Jacki Schecner, the communications director for Health Care For America Now, told In These Times, "These proposals would just allow private insurance companies to compete against each other to jack up rates."

As first reported in Politico, most of these bogus alternatives, as denounced by the originator of the public option, Yale Political Science Professor Jacob Hacker, would empower nonprofits to offer additional plans to the public. But as Schechner says, "Just because it's a nonprofit doesn't mean that it's operating for the public good; it just means it doesn't have shareholders."

By Monday afternoon, yet another idea was thrown into the mix as a bargaining chip as the  public option seemed on its way out: expanding Medicare eligibility to cover people under 66, to  those age 55 or 60. Yet the Medicare buy-in, according to Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic, would likely be  restricted to those without any other coverage, so that it would cover only about two to three million people, although still well worth doing.

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By Seth Wessler

Almost two years ago, Vincent, a slim 46-year-old black man dressed in a plaid shirt, worked as a maintenance technician in Detroit. He had worked for the company for almost three months, but five days before his position converted to full time with benefits, his employer ran a criminal background check and told Vincent to pack it up.

"A lot of times, they cut you out of the job before they hire you in [full time]," Vincent said sitting at a diner near the temporary worker center where he waits for work from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day.

Vincent has held a few temporary jobs since but hasn't found even a day of work recently. A breaking and entering conviction from 25 years ago follows him everywhere. "It's real hurtful to know that your chances are so broke down to zero," he said.

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Iraq Oil Workers Union leader Hassan Juma'a Awad said the union will fight to keep foreign companies from unfairly exploiting his country's resources.   (Photo by Kari Lydersen)

By Kari Lydersen

CHICAGO—In Iran, trade unionists face imprisonment, or even death, for organizing... And they are gearing up for a huge round of lay-offs triggered by President Ahmadinejad's slashing of public subdidies.

In Pakistan, labor organizing is a challenge when public attention is focused mostly on daily suicide bombings and the struggle for a modicum of peace. It is even harder for women labor leaders like Rubina Jamil, who must contend with a patriarchal and feudal society that expects women to stay in the home.

In Venezuela, trade unionists play a key role in maintaining and promoting the political shift away from U.S. hegemony in the region. Meanwhile energy sector labor leaders like Toni Leon feel their industry makes the country a target for oil-hungry foreign aggressors.

These were the messages during an international panel at the U.S. Labor Against War national leadership meeting in a Chicago suburb Monday. (Read Michelle Chen's preview blog here.)

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U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (2L) sits with journalists, including New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (2R), during the closing session of the administration's Jobs and Economic Growth Forum on December 3, 2009 in Washington, D.C.   (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

By Art Levine

Today's suprising downturn in unemployment was welcome news, but there's still rampant unemployment amid a relatively slow recovery.  The still-troubling jobs picture throws into high relief a potential conflict between unions and progressives seeking ambitious jobs programs while the President is apparently still cool to major new expenditures on this front.  At best, he and his advisors on Friday sent mixed signals on how far he's willing to go, with the final outline of his jobs plan to be unveiled next week.

At the same time, labor leaders gave the president and his summit high marks, seeing in the event hopes for a powerful government response to the crisis.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trunmka said on MSNBC's The Ed Show last night:

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By David Moberg

The drop in the numbers of jobs lost last month and in November’s unemployment rate–from 10.2 to 10.0 percent–is certainly good news. But the longer term picture still looks grim.

That’s underscored by new research from John Schmitt and Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research showing that American workers are likely to lose $1 trillion in wages before the job market recovers. And the biggest share of that loss is yet to come: since the downturn started in 2008, unemployed workers have lost only about a third of the total. Schmitt and Baker estimate total losses in 2009 and 2010 will be greater than in 2009.

Friday’s unemployment figures are not likely to affect the estimate by much. Baker writes:

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Gabriel Thompson at work in the lettuce fields of Yuma, Ariz.  

By Kari Lydersen

They call them the “jobs Americans won’t do”: picking lettuce, pulling apart frozen chickens, toiling in a hot kitchen and other grueling, dangerous, mind-numbing or otherwise highly undesirable jobs.

Most people know that for years immigrants—disproportionately Latino —have made up the bulk of these workforces. Since immigration crackdowns and increased border security post 9-11, employers have periodically reported worker shortages especially for farms and slaughterhouses.

After reading a New York Times article about an exodus of slaughterhouse workers following an immigration crackdown, journalist and SEIU researcher Gabriel Thompson decided to spend a year “working in the shadows” – shoulder to shoulder with immigrants, doing the jobs most Americans like him notoriously “won’t do.”

And he found out why.

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By Michelle Chen

With epidemic joblessness and endless warfare dragging on alongside each other, the political tensions surrounding U.S. war policy and the economy overlap tightly. This week, more news of a declining economy at home was entwined with President Obama's announcement of a drastic surge in Afghanistan.

The economic and military battles will converge this weekend at the national conference of U.S. Labor Against the War in Chicago. Labor, women and youth activists from Iraq and Pakistan, U.S. war veterans, and policy experts will gather to discuss how to pressure lawmakers to aid embattled American workers while ending militarism on the other side of the globe.

The central theme is that both aims can, and must, be pursued in tandem.

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Posters calling for solidarity with SME line the streets throughout Mexico City.   (Photo by Micah Williams)

By Micah Williams

MEXICO CITY—As the Mexican government refuses to budge in its decision to disband a state-owned electricity company, firing 44,000 unionists in the process, a national grassroots movement is growing that politicians may not be able to ignore for long.

The Mexican Electricians Union (Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas) represented all electricians of the Light and Power Company of Mexico (Luz y Fuerza del Centro), one of Mexico's two state-owned electricity companies, along with the Federal Electricity Commission (Comision Federal de Electricidad). As reported on this blog, the Mexican government unexpectedly announced Luz y Fuerza's dissolution on October 11, citing the company's supposed inefficiency and waste. The move also entailed the mass firing of SME's 44,000 members.

Many of the electricians say this is no coincidence. SME is democratic and fiercely independent in a country where the majority of unions are corrupt, bureaucratic, and foot soldiers for the country's political parties. It is also one of the country's strongest, and has opposed President Felipe Calderon's past efforts to privatize the country's electricity.

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By Roger Bybee

The very notion of government-mandated paid sick leave—even with the specter of potentially fatal H1N1 flu hovering over us—remains deeply offensive to Big Business, as witnessed both in cities like Milwaukee.
and at the federal level.

Thus, the modest requirement of seven paid sick days proposed in the Healthy Families Act introduced by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy and U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) for all U.S. workers is depicted as an onerous burden to small business and immensely damaging to U.S. competitiveness.

PREDICTABLE PLOYS: HUMAN SHIELD & STAYING COMPETITIVE

To oppose Healthy Families Act, the Chamber official employs Corporate America's two most predictable techniques for resisting reform. First, there's the "human shield technique" where small businesses are placed front and center,with a message of, "If you try to regulate big business, you'll only be kiling off mom and pop operations."

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Activists protest in front of the Washington, D.C., office of Goldman Sachs November 16, 2009.   (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

By Lindsay Beyerstein

Bloomberg News columnist Alice Schroeder reported earlier this week that Goldman Sachs executives are loading up on guns to defend themselves against the general public: 

“I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.

The NYPD confirmed to Schroeder that several of the executives she asked about did indeed have pistol permits. The bankers were seeking "a combination of personal protection and wealth protection," Schroeder explained in an interview with Betty Liu of Bloomberg TV.

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By Stephen Franklin

If you drive a few blocks from Barack Obama’s Chicago home, you are plunged downward into a place where hope is a mirage.

It is a world of few good breaks and few good jobs.

This sprawling area on Chicago’s South Side has the nation’s second-highest unemployment rate. It was 23.2 percent in 2008. If you keep going west, then you hit Austin, the community with the nation’s seventh highest unemployment rate last year.

Lou Ransom, editor of the Chicago Defender, Chicago's historic black newspaper, wrote a powerful column the other day about meeting the jobless on the streets of South Side and West Side Chicago. He wrote:

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