LABOR CALENDAR; click here for latest listings Baltimore Symphony Musicians picket line: Fri, August 16, 11:00am – 12:30pm 
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." Read more here 
Is your local participating in Labor Day 2019? 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. 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, Ghost Work, co-authored with a colleague from India, to the AFL-CIO’s “Ideas@Work” seminar on July 24 and WPFW’s 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 History Labor History Today (8/18): Nat Turner; The Moment Was Now
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
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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