Earlier this fall, in a downtown Toronto office, a Native American woman recanted her 1976 testimony that served as the basis for extraditing American Indian Movement (AIM) activist Leonard Peltier from Canada to the United States.
Ten days of negotiations between advertising agencies and unions representing 135,000 commercial actors collapsed September 27 without reaching any agreement in the five-month strike. The failure of talks, the most substantial since members of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists (AFTRA) walked out May 1, raises concerns that the strike may drag on for an extended period.
United Airlines management and negotiators for the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) reached a tentative agreement Saturday after months of protests by pilots against the slow pace of negotiations. Neither the airlines nor management have released any details of the deal, which must be approved by the union's executive board meeting September 6-8 before being taken to United's 10,500 pilots for ratification.
The top negotiator for the advertising agencies fired a shot across the bow in the three-month-old strike by commercial actors, warning that if the leaderships of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television & Radio Artists (AFTRA) did not accept the industry's demands for rollbacks in contracts representing 130,000 striking actors, they face the possibility of being excluded from the production of commercials for TV, cable and the Internet.
Contract negotiations between the advertising agencies and unions representing 135,000 striking commercial actors broke off July 21 after the second day of talks. The negotiations represented the first time the two sides had met face-to-face since the period immediately preceding the outbreak of the now 12-week-old strike.
Talks sponsored by the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service between unions representing 130,000 striking commercial actors and negotiators for the ad industry in the US collapsed at the end of the first day. Federal mediators were unable to find grounds for resuming serious negotiations aimed at ending the two-month old strike. Neither side gave ground on the major issue of compensation for actors who perform in ads for commercial television and cable.
The walkout by 135,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) against US advertisers is reaching its two month mark, in the wake of the recent failed attempt to reopen contract talks.
A group of immigrant workers has launched a suit against a famous New York fashion house charging it with running clothing sweatshops that forced employees to work long hours and cheated them out of overtime.
Northwest Airlines flight attendants ratified a new five-year agreement by a 68 percent margin last week, with some 87 percent of 11,000 members of Teamsters Local 2000 voting. The agreement provides for initial pay raises of from 8 to 27.7 percent with the higher raises distributed to the lowest paid flight attendants.
Reuters News Service, basing itself upon notes taken at a closed-door meeting of the Association of National Advertisers, reports that ad agencies are abandoning attempts to shoot ads in Hollywood and its environs, one of the main centers of a strike by unionized commercial actors.
A provocative magazine advertisement has added new fuel to the fire in the three-week-old strike by 135,000 actors against the advertising industry. The advertising agency RSA USA ran an ad in the weekly trade publication Shoot which pictured an elderly African woman's wrinkled breasts and was captioned “In South Africa, this what SAG means,” SAG being a crude pun on the acronym for the Screen Actors Guild, one of the two unions involved in the strike.
The Department of Transportation (DOT) is proposing new guidelines that would raise the number of hours truck drivers can operate their vehicles without resting from 10 to 12 hours. For 60 years truck drivers have operated under an 18-hour cycle that limits driving to a 10-hour shift with eight hours of rest. The new formula would establish a 24-hour cycle consisting of 12 hours on and 12 hours off.
The president of Teamsters Local 2000, representing 11,000 flight attendants involved in contract talks with Northwest Airlines, suspended Andy Damis, a member of the union's negotiating team, for revealing the local's contract proposals to union members.
Boeing engineers and technical workers voted by a 70 percent margin to approve a March 17 tentative agreement ending the 40-day strike by nearly 20,000 members of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA).
Northwest Airlines announced March 8 that they have fired 12 flight attendants for allegedly organizing a sick-out over New Year's to protest failed contract negotiations. Teamsters Local 2000, which represents 11,000 flight attendants at Northwest, put the figure of fired attendants at 18, along with another 6 attendants who resigned following interrogation by company officials.
In an effort to weaken the month-long strike by more than 17,000 engineers and technical workers, Boeing Corp. announced that it was moving to impose the terms of its last contract offer and would grant pay raises to workers who cross the picket line and return to the job. The action is the latest signal that Boeing is determined not to back down in the strike by members of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA).
Boeing union officials representing over 22,000 technical workers and engineers retreated from a threat to launch a February 3 strike against the aerospace giant as union members voted down the company's latest offer.
Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, by Kevin Kenny, Oxford University Press, 1998, 336 pages
Three lawsuits filed January 13 in California state court on behalf of 50,000 foreign garment workers charge major US retailers with "racketeering conspiracy" for producing clothing with indentured labor under sweatshop conditions on the island of Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands, a US Commonwealth in the South Pacific.
In the cold, early morning hours of Sunday, December 20, over 600 Minnesota State Troopers, Minneapolis Police and Hennepin Country Sheriff's deputies stormed seven houses occupied by the environmental group Earth First! and Native American members of the Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota Community. The activists were protesting the rerouting of Highway 55 through Minneapolis's Hiawatha Avenue neighborhood and the adjoining area of Minnehaha Park.
