Teamsters
CP Rail hit by strike by Teamsters NewsTalk1010 …Some 3,300 locomotive engineers and other train workers have gone on strike at CP Rail...
Teamsters Make Deal With CN, Prepare for Strike at CP Bloomberg News …A union representing locomotive engineers reached a tentative contract agreement with Canada’s largest railroad while calling on members to prepare for a strike against Canadian Pacific Railway Co., the second-largest…
Trade
Throw the Truth Out the Door: President Obama Has to Pass a Trade Deal Center for Economic and Policy Research …Apparently anything goes when the big corporations want a trade deal. Otherwise serious people will just make stuff up, because hey, the big campaign contributors want a trade deal to make themselves richer. The latest effort in creative myth-making comes from Third Way, which tells us that post-NAFTA trade deals aren't job losers like NAFTA...
TTIP: The mother of all trade deals? AlJazeera …political parties and campaigners from across Europe under the banner "Stop TTIP" oppose the deal, saying an accord will undermine European food and environmental laws and give too much power to US corporations...
State Battles
'Right-to-work' bill with 50-cent wage hike moves to House floor in New Mexico The Santa Fe New Mexican … the House Judiciary Committee on Friday voted along partisan lines in favor of an amended "right-to-work" measure, with Republicans tacking a small increase in the statewide minimum wage to the controversial labor bill that would ban compulsory union fees...
Right-to-Work Debate emissourian.com …The vote was historic in the sense that it was the first time one of the chambers in the General Assembly passed a right-to-work bill. But that doesn’t mean Missouri is poised to become the nation’s 25th right-to-work state. Far from it…
War on Workers
New Milestone: Majority of Public School Students Now Considered Low-Income Angry Bear …Students are eligible for free meals if they live in households with no more than 135 percent of the poverty level, and they qualify for reduced-price meals if household income is no more than 185 percent of the poverty level. In 2013, the federal poverty threshold was $23,550 for a family of four...
Right-to-work laws are union-hating Republican’s weapon of choice Raw Story …Last week, the Supreme Court announced it would hear a case that could very well finish off American unions in the last bastion where they have any significant presence at all, the public sector . The case, Friedrichs v California Teachers Association, will decide if right-to-work laws (designed to bankrupt unions by encouraging employees who benefit from collective bargaining agreements to not pay for them) will extend to all public employees nationwide – an outcome Justice Samuel Alito has all but promised to deliver...
American labor-union strikes are almost completely extinct Quartz …In 2014, there were only 11 strikes or lockouts in the US involving more than 1,000 workers. That was down from 15 the previous year, and tied for the second-lowest total on record, according to just-released numbers from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics...
Feed the Rich and Starve the Poor (Cont.) Economic Populist …It didn't take long before the new GOP House began passing a series of deficit-hiking tax cuts that will primarily help the rich at the expense of everybody else. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the new chairman of the Ways and Means Committee (which writes tax legislation), wants to make some previous tax breaks permanent...
