Labor Union Blog

Economic Report:

By Doug Cunningham

Food prices were sharply higher in April – the biggest jump in food prices in 18 years. Inflation is running officially now at 3.9 percent. Gas prices have hit another record high. And home foreclosures in April were up 65 percent over a year ago – with more than 243,000 households going into foreclosure. Kevin Phillips, author of the book “Bad Money.” says more misery is being felt by workers than government numbers indicate. He says real consumer prices are up by much more than the official inflation number.

While Senator Hillary Clinton spent Wednesday hitting the talk show circuit on the heels of her 41 point victory in West Virginia, Senator Barack Obama was hitting the manufacturing circuit in Michigan:

Senator Barack Obama spent Wednesday touring plants in Michigan on Wedenesday and while in Warren, Mich. He laid out his manufacturing plan. The proposal calls for $150 billion for the development of green technology over the next decade which he believes will result in the creation of more than 5 million green jobs and reinforce the country’s infrastructure. Obama used the opportunity to take on his Republican Presidential competitor John McCain. He said McCain doesn’t have a vision for bringing jobs back to Michigan or even creating new ones. Obama said his plan will benefit from the skilled workforce that already exists in the Midwest by offering job training that allows competition in the world economy. McCain’s campaign fired back after Obama spoke calling his manufacturing plan “weak leadership and poor judgment.”

By Doug Cunningham

Will a blue tide wash the red away in many states and congressional districts this Fall? United Steelworkers Indiana Rapid Response Coordinator Brett Voorhies thinks it will. Democrats backed by unions have won three recent special elections in solid “red” congressional districts – Illinois, Louisiana and Mississippi. In Indiana Voorhies says the USW made the difference backing Jill Long Thompson – the first woman to win the Democratic gubernatorial nomination there. He believes unions will help turn Indiana blue, regardless of whether the Democratic presidential nominee is Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

Indian workers from the Signal International shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss., rallied in front of the White House last month.

Guest workers who risked everything to come from India and work on the Gulf Coast, only to find abuse and injustice, now are risking the only thing they have left—their lives—to gain the justice they have been denied on the job.

The water-only hunger strike began today in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, with six of the more than 500 workers who came to this country beginning in 2006 in what turned out to be a human-trafficking scheme under the guise of the H-2B guest worker program. Some 30 more workers will join the hunger strike in two waves, on May 21 and on May 28.

The workers, who are welders and pipe fitters, paid $20,000 to recruiters who promised permanent residency and citizenship under the H-2B guest worker program, which business interests want to expand. When they got to this country, they say their employer, Signal International, held them in modern-day forced labor at its shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss. Signal makes the huge floating oil rigs for the offshore fields in the Gulf.