American Workers in the Age of Austerity
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| Kimberly Freeman Brown |
If you’re in Washington, D.C., next week, hope you can stop by the AFL-CIO for a discussion on “American Workers in an Age of Austerity.” Panelists will talk about what we can learn from the past as we strategize for the future in the context of labor, progessives and the current U.S. political environment.
Join Dissent co-editor Michael Kazin and Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson in a panel moderated by American Rights at Work Executive Director Kimberly Freeman Brown.
A discussion will follow the event, which is Wednesday, Jan. 25, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the AFL-CIO.
The event is sponsored by Dissent magazine and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor of Georgetown University.
To RSVP or for more information, contact editors@dissentmagazine.org.
Labor Lab Examines PATCO Strike’s Impact on Collective Bargaining, Then and Now
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Thirty years ago, Ronald Reagan fired the nation’s air traffic controllers after they walked out on strike, signaling an escalation in the war on workers and the middle class that is still being waged three decades later.
On Tuesday, Oct. 18, Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor is hosting a “labor lab” on “The PATCO Legacy and the future of Collective Bargaining.”
The event features Georgetown history professor Joe McCartin, author of the book “Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike That Changed America.” The panel includes former air traffic controllers and Ken Moffett, the former director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.
The labor lab begins at 5:30 p.m. EDT in the ICC Auditorium on the Georgetown campus in Washington, D.C. Click here for more information and here for a recent interview on the strike and its impact McCartin gave NPR’s Diane Rehm.
CWA Co-Sponsors Special Panel on Jobs and Innovation
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Tomorrow Today, at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., some of the nation’s leading economists, educators and union leaders will take part in a special panel discussion, “Jobs, Inequality and the Role of Government: Improving the Economic Competitiveness and Innovative Capacity of the U.S.”
Panelists will discuss the crucial challenges to the nation’s competitiveness and capacity for innovation and outline an agenda for meeting those challenges.
Early this year, President Obama released an updated “Strategy for American Innovation” and the Department of Commerce was tasked with a comprehensive study of the economic competitiveness and innovative capacity of the United States. An Innovation Advisory Board of leaders in academia, business and labor was created to work in consultation with the Department of Commerce on this important report.
The Communications Workers of America (CWA)—which has a seat on the Innovation Advisory Board—is co-sponsoring this conference with Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor and the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).
The panel runs from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. at the Georgetown University Law Center. For more information and to register, click here.
Georgetown University Workers, Students Build a Union and Community
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Seth Newton Patel at the Kalmanovitz initiative for Labor and the Working Poor sends us this report on the organization’s first in a series of Kalmanovitz Initiative events exploring the state and future of collective bargaining, the Collective Bargaining Project.
Georgetown University Aramark workers, students and faculty joined in a panel this week to describe their successful campaign to organize a union of Aramark food service workers with UNITEHERE. Two workers from the union organizing committee, two student activists and Georgetown History professor Michael Kazin (who wrote a piece on the campaign in The New Republic) spoke on a panel moderated by the Kalmanovitz Initiative’s Executive Director Joseph McCartin.
‘The Kids Aren’t Alright’: Young Workers Hit Hard in Bad Economy
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We all know the nation’s jobless rate—with more than 16 million U.S. workers unemployed—is really, really bad. In fact, overall unemployment increased by 4.7 percentage points from December 2007, when the recession began. Yet the situation is even worse for young workers, worsening by more than 7.4 points since the recession’s onset.
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) released a report today on the severe economic difficulties facing young workers, who now account for 26.4 percent of unemployed workers, even though they make up 13.5 percent of the overall labor force.
As “The Kids Aren’t Alright” points out:
Young men have an unemployment rate 7.5 points higher than that of young women. Young black workers face an unemployment rate of 32.5 percent, compared with 15.2 percent for young white workers. Among young Hispanic workers, the unemployment rate has more than doubled since the recession began, from 11 percent in December 2007 to 24.2 percent in January 2010.
Concert Celebrates Studs Terkel’s Life, Work
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The life and times of the late labor activist and author Studs Terkel will be celebrated Monday at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., with a concert-style reading of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections of Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith.” Director Derek Goldman adapted the stage celebration from Terkel’s award-winning book of the same name.
The concert begins at 8 p.m. on Dec. 7 in Gaston Hall on the Georgetown campus. Click here for more information.
Terkel, who passed away last year at age 96, was renowned for his compilations of oral interviews with famous and mostly not-so-famous Americans. He talked with thousands of people about their experiences on the job, serving their country in World War II, their perceptions of race and, most recently, the challenges of growing old and facing death. One of his most famous books is Working, in which more than 100 Americans share their hopes, dreams and daily struggles on the job.
Georgetown University Grants Highest Honor to President John Sweeney
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It’s rare for a major university like Georgetown to grant honorary degrees. But rare are individuals like AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. Last night in a formal robe and gown ceremony followed by a celebration with Archbishop Donald Wuerl in Georgetown’s elegant Riggs Library, Georgetown University President John DeGioia conferred upon Sweeney the degree, Doctor of Laws, honoris causa.
Sweeney has dedicated his life to improving the lives of America’s working families, motivated in large part by his religious faith, one infused with the social justice teachings of the Catholic Church. Recognizing how Catholic doctrine influenced Sweeney’s life-long quest for justice and fairness for working people, DeGioia explained the importance of honoring Sweeney:
For many years, John Sweeney has worked to champion the dignity of workers—and work. And we at Georgetown take seriously the Catholic commitment to social justice for working people that has inspired John Sweeney’s remarkable career. That commitment has recently led us, with the help of the Kalmanovitz Charitable Foundation, to inaugurate a new effort here, the “Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor,” which we will formally inaugurate later this fall—and in whose work we hope to engage many of you in the years to come. Through its work, we hope to contribute, in our own way, to the tradition that John Sweeney has so well exemplified.
Students, Workers Urge Georgetown to Defend Workers’ Rights
Students at Georgetown University today called on the school to honor its ethical commitments and cut ties with an apparel manufacturer that students say busted a union and violated workers’ rights at a plant in Honduras.
At a rally on the university’s campus in Washington, D.C., Moises Elias Montoya Alvarado and Norma Estela Mejia Castellanos, who work at Russell Athletics’ Jerzees de Honduras factory—which produces Georgetown logo apparel—described how the company closed the plant this past weekend and shipped the work to cheaper nonunion plants. The Jerzees de Honduras factory, located near Pedro Sula, Honduras, is the only unionized Russell plant in the country.
“We have been campaigning for a year and a half to end the abuses in our factory and ensure that we are treated with dignity and respect,” said Montoya Alvarado.
