Cool Tools Serves Up Holiday Treats

by James Parks, Dec 22, 2007

The holiday season is a great time to do some reading, web surfing and listen to good music. And the items in the latest AFL-CIO Cool Tools really fit the bill.

With the 2008 campaign in full swing, Bruce Barry reminds us in Speechless: The Erosion of Free Expression in the American Workplace that the First Amendment does not fully protect your free speech on the job.

Amazingly, it’s legal for nearly any U.S. worker to be fired just for expressing an opinion. For example, Barry,  a professor of management and sociology at Vanderbilt University, tells us about a factory worker who was fired because her boss disagrees with the political bumper sticker on her car.

But the book is not all gloom and doom. Barry, who heads an American Civil Liberties Union chapter in Tennessee, suggests some common-sense reforms so that workers don’t have to check their rights at the workplace door.

Also, in Cool Tools, you’ll find out about two books that tell stories that don’t make the evening news. Juan Felipe Herrera, the son of Mexican immigrants and a University of California-Riverside professor, reveals in 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments 1971–2007 how undocumented immigrants build lives even though they are living in constant threat of being deported.  

Meanwhile, Phil Dine, a reporter for the St. Louis Post Dispatch, writes about the union movement—its strengths, its weaknesses and its pivotal importance for the American middle class in State of the Unions: How Labor Can Strengthen the Middle Class, Improve Our Economy, and Regain Political Influence.

Cool Tools also offers sites for Web surfing, such as www.folkstreams.net, which uses documentaries to capture the diversity of our culture and our workplaces. Our featured CD, “Altar of the Bottom Line,” includes songs by noted labor academic Tom Juravich, director of the University of Massachusetts Labor Center. Juravich sings of everything from immigrant workers to the crushing monotony of jobs in call centers to the bashing of schoolteachers and other songs like Billy Bragg’s anthem “Power in a Union.”

Click here to check out the latest Cool Tools.

Also check out the Cool Tools archives by clicking here. That’s where you’ll find such gems as “Karoake Union Songs,” the book Beware of Cat and Other Encounters of a Letter Carrier and resources such as the Flex Pack from the Labor Project for Working Families, which offers practical advice on the best flextime options to seek at the  bargaining table and when flextime can be a powerful organizing tool.

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