Labor News

The same coalition that defeated the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal is demanding a new NAFTA deal that benefits working people.

As NAFTA hearings open, more than 100,000 petition signatures and 50,000 comments have been filed by the coalition with the U.S. Trade Representative. The response was so strong that it crashed the US Trade Representative’s comment submission platform.

The groups in this anti-NAFTA coalition include the AFL-CIO, Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, Our Revolution, Economic Policy Institute and Citizens Trade Campaign among others.

Tuesday striking port truckers at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach joined a coalition of community, labor and clergy leaders for a rally and march through Long beach with elected officials. The strike is part of a long campaign by port truckers, backed by the Teamsters, to end mis-classification of truckers as independent contractors instead of employees. The truckers are also demanding union rights. Fred Potter is a Teamsters Vice-President and head of the union’s ports division.

Transit workers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin are up in arms over city plans to bring in a private company to operate a new fleet of streetcars.  The Amalgamated Transit Union is calling on the city to staff the streetcar system with workers from the County Transit System, one of few major employers in the city that provides jobs to a predominantly minority workforce.  Instead, the city is currently considering front-runner Transdev, a French-based multinational.  James Macon, President of ATU Local 998 noted that TransDev has a long and sordid history of antagonistic labor r

Port Truck Drivers are back on the picket lines this week at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, California.  Beginning Monday, this is the 15th strike since 2014 by drivers who are fed up with the abuse and exploitation of years of systematic wage theft and misclassification of drivers as independent contractors.

Nick Weiner is Campaign Director of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters’ Justice for Port Drivers Campaign:

The Chicago Teachers Union will vote this Fall on whether or not to approve a merger with The Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers. A thousand union teachers from 32 charter schools in the Chicago area voted to join the Chicago Teachers Union. Now members of the Chicago teachers Union will have their chance to vote on whether to approve the merger with the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers.
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International Domestic Workers Federation President Myrtle Witbooi, speaking on Canada’s Radio Labour, says the 67 million domestic workers in the world deserve full worker rights in their respective nations. Witbooi says the International Domestic Workers Federation is organized and run to be the global voice of domestic workers.

Myrtle Witbooi: “This federation wants to ensure that we become the voice for the voiceless. This federation wants to speak out.

Two thousand IBEW Local 3 technicians have been on strike for over nine weeks at Spectrum cable in New York City and New Jersey.

On the New York City picket lines WIN interviewed this striker, who chose not to give his name, about the issues in the strike.

China Labor Watch says in seventeen years of conducting investigations into working conditions at Chinese factories none of its investigators were detained and arrested - until they investigated the factory that makes Ivanka Trump products.

Of three China Trade Watch investigators probing conditions at the plant supplying Ivanka Trump's company, one has been arrested and two are missing.

When neo-Nazis and fascists held their free speech rally in Portland Oregon just days after two people were brutally murdered trying to defend muslim women from a neo-nazi, the regional Carpenters union knew which side it was on.

Ben Basom is Director of Organizing and Communications with the Pacific Northwest Regional Council of Carpenters.