Hundreds of meatpackers from the Smithfield Foods hog processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina honored Martin Luther King Jr. Day at a January 15 rally in nearby Fayetteville, where they lambasted the company for its refusal to give workers the holiday off. Photo by Justice at Smithfield Smithfield’s 5,000 Tar Heel workers, the majority […]
Author Archive | William Johnson
SEIU Members Push Their Union to Change Its Position on Immigration
Members of the Service Employees (SEIU) in Northern California are demanding just immigration reform. That’s not too surprising. For the past two decades, SEIU has been one of organized labor’s strongest advocates for immigrant rights. This campaign, however, pits SEIU members not against anti-immigrant employers or politicians, but against their union’s top officials. Dubbing their […]
Solidarity for Never? Northwest Mechanics Strike Against Deep Pay Cuts, Outsourcing
Airline unions have made wave after wave of wage, benefit, and pension concessions since September 2001– often under the gun of bankruptcy threats. Now Northwest Airlines is upping the ante, pushing for a business model that copies non-union airlines like JetBlue and demanding to lay off more than half its maintenance workforce. So when 4,400 […]
