LabourStart and the U.S. Union Movement: Making Connections
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This week, at the first LabourStart conference ever held in the United States, one of the most important topics of conversation centered around strategies for connecting the United States and global union movements and the active, energetic community that LabourStart represents.
It’s an important question, participants agreed, because of how workers across the world are increasingly tied together by globalization. Workers in different countries, but working for the same company, could have much more in common than they realize, and workers across the world are facing many of the same issues that workers in the United States face, as is obvious from a look at LabourStart’s headlines.
State Workers, Taxpayers Caught in a Fiscal Vise
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The badly needed economic recovery package included some substantial assistance for states that are facing growing budget shortfalls, possible layoffs and cuts in vital services. But despite critics’ noise about the amount of spending in the package, even with that helping hand, the fiscal outlook for states is still “dire” and likely will worsen, says the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP):
The state fiscal situation is dire. Revenues are declining, and the need for services such as Medicaid is rising as people lose income and jobs….If revenue declines persist as expected in many states, additional budget cuts are likely. Budget cuts often are more severe in the second year of a state fiscal crisis, after reserves have been largely depleted and thus are no longer an option for closing deficits.
Rep. Ellison Joins Faith and Labor Leaders in Urging Release of Jailed Workers
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Barb Kucera, editor of Workday Minnesota, follows up on the Indian guest workers who this past spring and summer waged a hunger strike for justice. The welders and pipe fitters had been lured from their native India to the United States with promises of green cards and good jobs at Signal International’s shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss. Once there, they found themselves held in modern-day forced labor, victims of a human-trafficking scheme under the guise of the H-2B guest worker program. Now, 23 of the workers have been jailed by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Community leaders in Minnesota—including Congressman Keith Ellison and the Rev. Craig Johnson, bishop of the Minneapolis Area Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America—issued a call for the release of 23 workers from India held in the Fargo, N.D., jail by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
