Union members ARE rocket scientists, US unions tell Fox News

Here’s something to raise a few smiles this weekend. Right-wing US Fox ‘news’ has come under a tweeting assault from US unions this week after one of their presenters suggested that union members couldn’t have built the Apple i-phone (as one comment said, union members do make the Apple i-phone: just Chinese union members, not [...]

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Our new US recruiter-in-chief: President Obama

President Obama spoke to the AFLCIO Executive Council (the equivalent of the TUC General Council) this week, and he gave a ringing endorsement of union membership, starting off by quoting his predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He said:
“So FDR I think said—he was asked once what he thought about unions.  He said, “If I was a worker [...]

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TUC Green Workplaces project provides model for US

Greetings from the unions of the Oregon AFL-CIO!  I’ve been in London for a week now, the first leg of my study tour of the TUCs Green Workplaces Project.  It’s been an exciting week as I’ve begun to learn how unions in the UK are approaching climate change, green job training and member involvement in [...]

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West Wing stars back US unions

For many people, life imitated TV when Barack Obama became President. They see him as the real-life embodiment of everyone’s favourite US President, Josiah (Jed) Bartlet from The West Wing. Now, though, as Obama’s real-life West Wing takes shape, some of the actors who played the President and his team have joined up to support publicly the [...]

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US unions record fastest growth since 1983

US unions grew by nearly half a million members in 2008 according to the latest US Government figures, increasing the rate of unionisation from 12.1% to 12.4% in a year. It’s their best year for a quarter of a century, and the main reason seems to be that in some states, it got easier to [...]

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Nobel laureate backs union rights in the USA

Paul Krugman, the winner of the Nobel prize for economics, says that the US needs the Employee Free Choice Act that US unions are campaigning for. Writing in Rolling Stone magazine (a journal of economic record, of course!) he says that the US economy needs unions just as much as workers do. Last time US [...]

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New York Times backs pro-union laws

It’s either a sign of a more diverse media, or just how bad things have got in the US under Bush, that the New York Times has published an editorial (not just a comment article) calling for more freedoms for trade unions to organise.

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