Labor Union Blog

Ford Motor Company announced plans for buyouts of 1300 workers on Saturday. The buyouts are targeted at 800 workers in Chicago and 500 in Louisville. Additional buyouts will be announced for a plant in Cleveland. The company is reducing shifts at the impacted plants from two to one as it adjusts for vehicle demand. The last time Ford offered buyouts 4,200 workers took the company up on the offer; that was just a little over half of what the company had sought.

Ford Motor Company announced plans for buyouts of 1300 workers on Saturday. The buyouts are targeted at 800 workers in Chicago and 500 in Louisville. Additional buyouts will be announced for a plant in Cleveland. The company is reducing shifts at the impacted plants from two to one as it adjusts for vehicle demand. The last time Ford offered buyouts 4,200 workers took the company up on the offer – that was just a little over half of what the company had sought.

Lede: Workers face increasing job losses and the Economic Policy Institute says policy changes are needed to help us. Doug Cunningham has more on the story.

By Doug Cunningham

For four months in a row now, U.S. workers have suffered a net loss of jobs. Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute says working people are in for more of the same.

[Mishel]: “The last six months the economy barely grew at all and as a consequence we’re gonna see persistent loss of jobs for months to come and steadily rising unemployment. Whenever that happens, and we’re already seeing it, wages grow much more slowly, hours of work don’t rise or they actually decline. Fewer family members are working, people are working part-time jobs, they want a full-time job.”

Lede: Workers face increasing job losses and the Economic Policy Institute says policy changes are needed to help us. Doug Cunningham has more on the story.

By Doug Cunningham

For four months in a row now U.S. workers have suffered a net loss of jobs. Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute says working people are in for more of the same.

[Mishel]: “The last six months the economy barely grew at all and as a consequence we’re gonna see persistent loss of jobs for months to come and steadily rising unemployment. Whenever that happens , and we’re already seeing it, wages grow much more slowly, hours of work don’t rise or they actually decline. Fewer family members are working, people are working part-time jobs, they want a full time job.”

The success and strength of the union movement derives from the hard work of rank-and-file members whose dedication to improving the lives of America’s workers is manifest in their daily actions and in willingness to go above the call of duty. At the AFL-CIO Heart of the Movement, we recognize some of these heroes of the union movement. Here are four union members we’ve recently profiled. You can click here to read all the stories of these and other Hearts of the Movement.

George Calko

• George Calko, in his late 20s, is part of the future of the union movement. A member of the Steelworkers (USW), he is an organizer in his home state of Ohio for the Blue-Green Alliance, a partnership between the USW and the Sierra Club, which recently launched campaigns for green jobs and joined with Nobel winner Al Gore in the search for a solution to global warming. Calko says the connection between labor and environmentalists makes perfect sense. “We’re going to have green jobs, or we’ll have no jobs at all,” he says. “And we want clean cities and a healthy environment to raise our children.”