We are happy to report that Secrets of a Successful Organizer has now been translated into seven languages: Spanish, Japanese, German, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Swedish, Danish, Quebecois French, and, most recently, Korean. (See below for details on how to get copies.) We’ve also heard from union activists in Brazil, Norway, and Poland who are interested in translating it.
In my 25 years as a union organizer and labor educator, my core purpose has been to help working-class people recognize and act on their own power.
Cuando Evelyn comenzó a trabajar en Marder Trawling, un centro de procesamiento de mariscos en New Bedford, Massachusetts, se enteró de una condición de trabajo inusual: tendría que pagar discretamente a su gerente $100 dólares semanales por el privilegio de trabajar, dijo. “Yo no tenía trabajo, y tengo a mis niños. Yo le dije, ‘Está bien. Con tal de tener un trabajo.’
When Evelyn began work at New Bedford, Massachusetts, seafood processing center Marder Trawling, she learned of an unusual condition of employment: She’d need to quietly pay her manager $100 per week for the privilege of working, she said. “I didn’t have work, and I have kids,” she said. “So I told him, ‘All right,’ just to have a job.
“There were times I didn’t have money for rent, bills, or food for my kids,” she told Labor Notes, but her manager was happy to oblige: she could skip a week’s payment, and owe $200 the next week.
In the 1960s and 70s, conservative leaders of the AFL-CIO and many national unions viewed militant activists in the civil rights, anti-war, environmental, and women’s movements with alarm. When student radicals started migrating from campus and community organizing to unionized workplaces, labor officials did not welcome them.
Union members in many states and cities are pushing for a stronger voice in pension investments. And sometimes they’re actually winning: They’re holding pension boards accountable and advocating for investments that insure worker protections, climate resiliency, and decent retirement benefits.
Silicosis is a lethal workplace illness that killed thousands each year up through the 1960s. In recent decades, thanks to union workplace safety fights, it became much rarer. Annual deaths dropped to the hundreds. The disease affected mostly older workers with longer exposures.
So it was hard for stonecutter Gustavo Reyes Gonzalez, 35, to get a clear diagnosis in 2019 when he first developed a cough and shortness of breath. It wasn’t until two years later that he was told he had silicosis—and only had a year to live.
Last month, 3,800 meatpacking workers in UFCW Local 7 in Greeley, Colorado launched the industry’s first major strike in 40 years.
The three-week unfair labor practice strike was the first time workers had ever struck the JBS Greeley beef packing plant, one of the company’s largest. ULP charges against JBS included the illegal termination of a member of the bargaining committee and surveillance and intimidation of workers for participation in union activity.
Over the last decade Rhode Island has been a hotbed of progressive, pro-worker legislation. But it wasn’t always this way. It took years of proactive organizing by the labor movement on legislative and electoral campaigns.
This “blue” New England state was led by Republican Governor Donald Carcieri from 2003 to 2011. During his term he cut 1,000 public sector jobs, passed a regressive property tax law, and attacked pensions for teachers and other public workers—actions that were enabled by centrist Democrats in the state legislature who were lukewarm towards labor.
Union baristas are finally back to the negotiating table with Starbucks, but the workers charge that rather than progressing, the company is reopening already agreed-upon issues.
“They're trying to move backwards on issues we've already settled instead of settling the few that we have left,” said Mina Leon, a barista in downtown Manhattan who struck for two months to get the company back to the table.