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AFGE sues to protect federal employee speech rights

Is your local participating in Labor Day 2019?

Help unaccompanied migrants get school-ready!

The challenges of organizing "ghost workers"

Today's Labor History

Today's Labor Quote

LABOR CALENDAR; [link removed] click here for latest listings

Union City Radio: 7:15a M-F; WPFW-FM 89.3

Baltimore Symphony Musicians picket line: Fri, August 16, 11:00am - 12:30pm
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, 1212 Cathedral St, Baltimore, MD 21201

AFGE sues to protect federal employee speech rights
The American Federation of Government Employees and AFGE Local 2578 last week sued the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) to protect the First Amendment rights of federal employees. The suit follows guidance issued by the OSC that presumptively restricts federal employees from expressing any opinion on "impeachment" or policy matters if the words "#resist" or "resistance" are used. "The members of Local 2578 work every day at the National Archives and Records Administration to preserve and provide public access to the records of our democracy," said Ashby Crowder, President of AFGE Local 2578. "This opinion is an extreme and unprecedented interpretation of the Hatch Act that violates federal employees' First Amendment rights. The chilling effect it has on the workplace deserves to be challenged." [link removed] Read more here

Is your local participating in Labor Day 2019?
UFCW 1994 is marching in Gaithersburg's 81st Annual Labor Day Parade. NoVA Labor is hosting their annual Labor Day Picnic. The DC Musician's Union is sending a brass quintet to play at NoVA Labor's Labor Day Picnic. If your local is participating in a local Labor Day activity, we'd like to hear about it: email mailto:[email protected] [email protected]

Help unaccompanied migrants get school-ready!
Jobs with Justice DC is working with Many Languages One Voice to fill 50 backpacks for unaccompanied migrants and immigrant youth organizers in the week before school starts. [link removed] Click here for details on how to purchase through the registry. "We're doing it because solidarity is an act of resistance," says JWJ DC. "We're doing it because these are kids, and they deserve to learn and grow. And we're doing it because these families may not know where else to turn."

The challenges of organizing "ghost workers"
Unions worldwide face problems organizing workers due to "dismemberment of full-time employment" by firms from Silicon Valley and elsewhere creating the new "gig economy," an anthropologist who recently finished a comprehensive book on it says.
Mary Gray brought that message and her book, [link removed] Ghost Work, co-authored with a colleague from India, to the AFL-CIO's "Ideas@Work" seminar on July 24 and WPFW's [link removed] Your Rights At Work radio show on August 15. Gray and her colleague interviewed workers in the new economy of Silicon Valley in California and the Pacific Northwest, plus southern India, home now to dozens of call centers and other enterprises transferred from the U.S. But individual workers, such as Uber and Lyft drivers, also undertake much of the ghost work. The problem unions face in organizing such ghost workers "is that our policies were built around assembly lines," where organizers could find the workers to talk with, Gray explained. The ghost workers aren't on assembly lines, and nobody knows exactly how many of them there are. "We have to redefine what it means to be a worker," to organize ghost workers, Gray said. Unions also must appeal to those workers' goals of working in order to live, not living around work. The ghost workers "are both competitors and collaborators" with each other in various job-related causes.

Today's Labor Quote: Abraham Lincoln

"I am glad to see that a system of labor prevails under which laborers can strike when they want to. ... I like the system which lets a man quit when he wants and wish it might prevail everywhere."
photo: Phelps-Dodge strike (see below)

Today's Labor History

Labor History Today (8/18): Nat Turner; The Moment Was Now
[link removed] Click here to check out this week's Labor History Today podcast. On this week's show: The R.J. Phillips Band's "Nat Turner"; Gene Bruskin discusses his new musical play, "The Moment Was Now," which takes place in post-civil war Baltimore in 1869, when "America almost did the right thing." Plus an update on the fate of the Victor Arnautoff murals.

First edition of IWW "Little Red Song Book" published - 1909

Some 2,000 United Railroads streetcar service workers and supporters parade down San Francisco's Market Street in support of pay demands and against the company's anti-union policies. The strike failed in late November in the face of more than 1,000 strikebreakers, some of them imported from Chicago - 1917

Founding of the Maritime Trades Dept. of the AFL-CIO, to give "workers employed in the maritime industry and its allied trades a voice in shaping national policy" - 1946

Phelps-Dodge copper miners in Morenci and Clifton Ariz. are confronted by tanks, helicopters, 426 state troopers and 325 National Guardsmen brought in to walk strikebreakers through picketlines in what was to become a failed three-year fight by the Steelworkers and other unions - 1983

Some 4,400 mechanics, cleaners and custodians, members of AMFA at Northwest Airlines, strike the carrier over job security, pay cuts and workrule changes. The 14-month strike was to fail, with most union jobs lost to replacements and outside contractors - 2005

Material published in UNION CITY may be freely reproduced by any recipient; please credit Union City as the source for all news items and www.unionist.com as the source for Today's Labor History.

Published by the Metropolitan Washington Council, an AFL-CIO "Union City" Central Labor Council whose 200 affiliated union locals represent 150,000 area union members. JACKIE JETER, PRESIDENT.

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