Klein, Cohn, Cobble Win Major Journalism Prizes
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A newspaper reporting team for Bloomberg News, two Washington, D.C., bloggers and a labor historian are among the winners of the 2010 Sidney Hillman Foundation Journalism Awards.
The awards will be presented tonight in a ceremony at The Times Center in New York City.
The Hillman Foundation praised the late Mark Pittman, Bob Ivry, Alison Fitzgerald and Craig Torres who made up the Bloomberg News reporting as “the first to determine the true cost to the taxpayer of the federal bailout of Wall Street.” Bloomberg successfully sued the Federal Reserve to gain access to information about the $2 trillion bailout for Big Banks. Pittman died in November.
Bloggers Jonathan Cohn and Ezra Klein will be honored for their in-depth coverage over the battle for health care reform. Cohn, whose blog The Treatment ended its run on The New Republic website in April, and Klein, who writes the Economic and Domestic Policy, and Lots of It blog for the Washington Post, provided “authoritative, up-to-the minute coverage of health care reform,” the Hillman judges said.
Dorothy Sue Cobble, professor of labor history and labor studies at Rutgers University, will receive the Sol Stetin Award for Labor History. Cobble is the author of the prize-winning books, “Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century” in 1991 and “The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America,” which won the 2005 Philip Taft Book Prize for the best book in American labor history.
Trumka: Employee Free Choice Restores Choice Back to Workers
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AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka set the record straight about what the Employee Free Choice Act is really about: The bill would restore the decision to join a union to workers—where it belongs.
In an interview yesterday on Bloomberg News, Trumka said the nation’s labor laws originally let workers decide how they want to join a union, but over the years that freedom has been hijacked by employers. The Employee Free Choice Act would ensure that workers, not employers, make that decision.
Trumka said the Employee Free Choice Act (which was introduced Tuesday)
would restore balance to a system that’s terribly broken….Our economy is two-thirds driven by consumer spending, but over the last 30 years, the system has caused workers’ wages to stagnate. This will give them the right to bargain collectively….It’ll strengthen the middle class, it’ll grow the economy, and it’ll close the wage gap between the very rich and the rest of us.
