AFL-CIO Convention Meeting in City Rich with Labor History
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The 26th AFL-CIO Convention, Sept. 13-17, will convene in a city rich with labor history. Pittsburgh is the birthplace of both the AFL and the CIO, as well as the United Steelworkers (USW), the Ironworkers and the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM). It also is the site of two legendary strikes—the Homestead steel mill strike in 1892 and the U.S. Steel strike in the 1930s.
Labor historian Charlie McCollester writes in The Point of Pittsburgh:
[Pittsburgh's] workers and industries had produced incalculable volumes of coal, iron, steel and glass. Its inventors and laborers had been the first to refine oil, manufacture aluminum and create some of the primary mechanisms of electrical generation and distribution. In a stupendous effort, its mills and factories had been the arsenal of democracy, providing much of the muscle that made the United States of America the world’s most powerful nation.
West Virginia Striking Nurses Win Benefits
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Here’s a great news report from Katrina Blomdahl, writer-researcher for RNs Working Together, a coalition of 10 AFL-CIO unions representing more than 200,000 registered nurses nationally.
In this tough economy, West Virginia nurses at the Appalachian Regional Healthcare (ARH) system are breathing a sigh of relief after the Kanawha County Circuit Court rejected an appeal by their employer to deny unemployment benefits to the nurses who walked the picket line from October to December 2007.
Turns out the hospital blew a filing deadline that the courts apparently intend to enforce.
To the nurses of the West Virginia Nurses Association/UAN it’s a real vindication. Not only did the court refuse to allow the employer to skirt the law for its own convenience—it jammed up the hospital system’s union-busting practices.
West Virginia Nurses Association’s Economic and General Welfare Chair Rue Hairston, RN, says the nurses
are ecstatic about the decision because it’s the David and Goliath story. Goliath keeps coming and David keeps winning.
