Labor Union Blog

By Doug Cunningham

The American Federation of Teachers has created a fund supported by four major foundations to seek teacher input to improve public education. AFT Vice-President Adam Urbanski heads the AFT Innovation Fund. It’s the first union-directed educational effort of its kind backed by major philanthropies. The goal is to support local and state efforts to improve education in three major areas – providing consistently high-quality instruction, dealing with out-of-school factors that impact student achievement and supporting collaborative arrangements between parents, educators and their unions and school management to help facilitate the implementation of policy improvements. The key, Urbanski says, is getting innovative input directly from teachers.

By Doug Cunningham

A thousand businesses have formed a coalition called Business Leaders for a Fair Economy to support the Employee Free Choice Act. Negotiations on the labor law reform making it easier for workers to join unions free of employer intimidation are ongoing, with action expected later this year once Al Franken is seated as Minnesota’s new senator. Business Leaders for A Fair economy says that good jobs with good wages create demand for the goods and services they provide and when workers do well it builds a stronger, more sustainable national economy.

By Doug Cunningham

Unemployment in the U.S. has hit 9.4 percent. That means 14.5 million workers are without jobs so far in this Great Recession. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says the May jobs loss report showing 345,000 more jobs gone is a moderation in the massive monthly jobs loss we’ve seen during the recession. But he says it’s small comfort to the millions of workers without jobs who are desperate to see hundreds of thousands of jobs per month created rather than destroyed. The AFL-CIO is urging the Obama administration to remain focused on economic stimulation. The labor federation has created the largest online resource for unemployed workers. You can find it at unemploymentlifeline.com

By Doug Cunningham

The sale of key Chrysler assets to Fiat is on hold today, awaiting a U.S. Supreme Court decision on whether or not it will hear an appeal to stop the sale. Some Indiana pension funds that hold Chrysler bonds filed an appeal with the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, alleging some illegalities in the way the Chrysler bankruptcy is treating bond debt holders. The Chrysler sale to Fiat must happen to keep the company’s structured bankruptcy plan on track. The sale will go ahead unless the Supreme Court intervenes today.

More bad news in a bad economy: Northland Poster Collective, an edgy, feisty producer of posters, T-shirts, pins, bumper stickers and note cards for union activists–and a union shop to boot–is closing its doors at the end of the month.

Says founding member and artist Ricardo Levins Morales:

“After 30 years of undermining Wall Street, it finally fell on us.”

The Minneapolis-based company always lived on a shoestring, and a frayed shoestring at that. But somehow, against all the odds, the collective survived for 30 years. The entire stock is now 50 percent off, and you can get some utterly unique items that may never be available again.

Northland folks are the ones who, among other things, coined or spread some of the slogans you’ll find on union members’ pins and bumper stickers, including “The Labor Movement: The Folks that Brought You the Weekend,” “Friends Don’t Let Friends Cross Picket Lines,” and “Unions: The Anti-Theft Device for Working People.”

There’s a good chance you already have something from Northland in your desk, on your wall, or stuck to your car bumper. But even if you don’t, visit the website at www.northlandposter.com, where you’ll find:

* A poster with a line of militant, working-class, obviously unionized rabbits with the caption, “Bosses Beware: When We’re Screwed, We Multiply.”

* A T-shirt depicting a bespectacled Mother Jones in her demure Victorian dress and her famous quote, “I’m Not a Lady, I’m a Hell Raiser.”

* Just in time for Gay Pride Day June 28, a button that reads, “Gay Marriage Doesn’t Scare Me: No Health Care Does!”

All of the good progressive causes Northland championed—unions, feminism, immigrants’ rights, the LGBT movement, small farmers and countless more—will be a little less vivid and witty when Northland shuts down June 30. Over the years, the staff has had lots of fun, using their art to raise consciousness and creating terrific work that almost no one else was doing.