As workers continue to be exploited by "Bracero-style" guest worker programs across the country, immigrant rights groups are gearing up for Sunday's immigrant rights march in Washington D.C.

A lawsuit filed this week by three migrant Mexican women who worked at Captain Charlie’s Seafood, Inc. in North Carolina—and allege they were victims of gender discrimination and wage theft—illustrates why people are marching to change America's immigration system.

Despite claims that women have advanced in the workplace, many are still treated like commodities; this is especially true for immigrant women who are particularly susceptible ­to exploitation.

Captain Charlie’s recruited men and women in Mexico and promised to pay the going-rate for seafood processing. But once workers arrived, the company reneged on its promise of a living wage. Companies will often advertise open jobs at low wages in the U.S. and thus ensure they can hire "guest workers" at even lower wages because they know that U.S. citizens will not apply.

In 2007, New York City public schools were poised to break new cultural ground. The city established the Khalil Gibran International Academy, a comprehensive public school specializing in the Arabic language. The grade 6-12 school, the first of its kind, was designed as a symbol of cross-cultural understanding in a city still healing from the scars of September 11.

It was also the opportunity of a lifetime for Debbie Almontaser, a Yemeni-American New Yorker, longtime educator and activist, who was chosen to head the new school. But that dream was soon extinguished by those who believe the city has no business engaging Arab culture through the classroom.

Before the school even opened its doors, a right-wing cabal launched a smear campaign against Almontaser and the city's Arab and Muslim communities. In the end, the school survived, but Almontaser was ousted in a storm of anti-Muslim screeds from the conservative media and blogosphere.

Mexican miners at Cananea, one of the world’s largest open pit copper mines and a cradle of the Mexican Revolution, have been on strike since July 2007 in a brutal stand-off with the company Grupo Mexico and the government. The strike has elicited solidarity strikes and actions across the country and is a key piece of a larger battle for union rights and democracy in Mexico.

The miners union and union democracy in general suffered a serious blow as a federal court decided last month that Grupo Mexico can fire the striking workers and terminate their labor agreement because the mine has become “inoperable” due to neglect and sabotage during the strike. The website LabourStart says the court decision “effectively eliminat(es) the right to strike in Mexico.”

Miners originally went on strike over extreme health and safety problems, and they have long charged that the company intentionally allowed conditions to deteriorate to try to break the union. Now, a serious battle could be brewing: The miners union has vowed to continue striking until a fair labor agreement is reached, and the government has threatened to use force to evict the miners.

Forty-three workers have been killed on Commonwealth Games projects in Delhi, India, according to a report released yesterday by a special panel. The High Court of Dehli appointed the four-member body to investigate rampant abuses of migrant construction workers in the run-up to the games.

Every four years, athletes from Britain and its former colonies face off in the Commonwealth Games, also known as the "Friendly Games." But the $16 billion spectacle doesn't seem so friendly to the people building the facilies.

Untold thousands of migrant workers have traveled to the capital in the hopes of getting construction jobs—there are an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 migrant construction workers in the city. They are hard at work building facilities and refurbishing tourist destinations, and the work is proceeding at breakneck speed because so many projects are behind schedule.

Congress sent to the White House Wednesday a nearly $18 billion jobs bill that most experts don't believe will create anywhere near the 11 million jobs needed to bring us back to pre-recession unemployment levels.

The bill is similar to an earlier $15 billion bill passed by the Senate, with some minor fixes in the House, that focuses on long-term infrastructure and what some critics see as dubious tax cuts for businesses. The $17.6 billion bill includes a one-year extension of the federal highway program, an extension of the Build America Bonds program that helps states finance certain infrastructure projects and tax incentives for employers to hire workers, as recapped by the AFL-CIO blog.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is one leader who understands that far more is needed, but it's not at all clear that there's either the grassroots activism or political appetite in Congress for massive spending needed to create millions of new jobs. This new package, by most assessments, wouldn't create any more than 250,000 new jobs.

Trumka and other advocates offer ambitous jobs plans that don't seem to have much traction now, despite a new proposed bill to create a million new local jobs. Trumka said:

For months, they toiled in a hellish wasteland of dust and rubble, where a towering symbol of modernity had crumbled into a pyre of toxic debris. Years later, the embers of Ground Zero still burn for the thousands who have seen their bodies ravaged by the fallout.

But over the past several days, the workers made ill by their work at the World Trade Center site received a dose of fresh hope, along with some familiar creeping doubt.

The city announced last week an offer for a massive settlement to end the burdensome litigation related to post-9/11 worker health issues, including asthma and heart problems. The deal would be worth up to about $675 million, allocating payments among police, firefighters and construction workers that could range up to $1 million.

Her opening reference is to Barack Obama.

By Akito Yoshikane

The United Auto Workers and Toyota reached a tentative agreement late Monday to shut down the company's only unionized factory in North America.

As part of the agreement, Toyota will pay $250 million to roughly 4,600 salaried and hourly employees at the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. plant, aka NUMMI. The mass layoffs will be largest in California since the Great Recession started in December 2007.

The factory, located in Fremont, is the last auto manufacturing plant in California. Up to 20,000 jobs in the surrounding area will also be affected by the closure. It's a move that couldn't have come at a worse time, as the surrounding communities grapple with the Great Recession and the state faces a massive budget crisis.

By Carl Finamore
 
Going to court can make anyone nervous. But in civil court, where breach of contract disputes are normally settled, the stakes are not quite as high as in criminal court. You can’t be thrown in jail. That’s a plus.
 
But there are also disadvantages for defendants in civil cases. There are no public defenders to exempt the accused from court costs. While the outcome of any legal proceeding is uncertain, civil court defendants are acutely aware from the very beginning that they may be stuck with the costs of litigation.
 
I think about this as I prepare to attend the opening of a civil trial next week in San Francisco federal court, where one of the oldest and largest unions in America—the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)—is suing individual leaders of one of the nation’s youngest unions—the National Union of Healthcare Workers.

As state and local government workers leave their offices today in Madison, Wis., they will be entertained by theater in the streets of Capitol Square. A play will feature the trial of a particularly nefarious villain: Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, as portrayed by the MadTown Liberty Players. Using props like large papier mache figures and recruiting non-professional actors (like union members), the local guerrilla theater group offers a play with a point: make Wall Street pay to re-create the jobs its speculative excess and abuse destroyed.

For the next two weeks, union members and community supporters in roughly 100 cities will stage similar protests called by the AFL-CIO to challenge the nation’s six biggest banks: JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Citibank and Morgan Stanley.

The federation’s 3 million-member community affiliate, Working America, will join in the protest by recruiting passersby at ATM machines of the big banks’ branches in 12 cities to pose for pictures with handmade signs–bearing messages like “where’s my bailout?”—that will be posted on a special website. The campaign—getting citizens to tell banks “I am not your ATM”—is part of the overall AFL-CIO effort to pressure banks to stop refusing to pay its share for job creation, to stop fighting financial reform, and to start lending in their communities to create jobs.

Can we finally stop worrying about the long-term devastation from high unemployment projected for up to seven more years, the large numbers of home foreclosures, and the millions of families anxious about being tossed out on the street?

After all, the U.S. economy grew at an impressive 5.9% annual clip in the further quarter. Profits are up. Corporate savings are up. But as the saying goes, statistics can be tortured into confessing just about anything. Robert Reich, the former labor secretary, incisively analyzes what he properly calls the hollow, unproductive economic activity that underlies this "sham recovery."

Still, leading Democrats can be heard trying to make the most out of rapidly declining job losses. Yes, there has been a huge improvement over the last miserable months created by the deregulatory approach of George W. Bush (and his predeceessor) that created the Wall St. meltdown. But a reduction in job losses is hardly an inspiring campaign theme for the 2010 mid-terms.

British Airways cabin crews say they will hold two weekend strikes totaling seven days later this month. Negotiations between the 12,000 crew members, represented by the British union Unite, and British Airways management broke down on Friday after management rejected the union's proposal of a 2.6% pay cut and other concessions.

The company issued a counter-proposal. Unite submitted the offer to the membership for consideration, but both sides continue to plan for a strike.

Like many airlines, British Airways is bleeding money. It is faring particularly badly right now because it depends so heavily on first- and business-class tickets to turn a profit. Cabin crews are frustrated because they are being asked to maintain luxury service while BA cuts crew sizes on long-haul flights.

As usual, when airline executives can't run their companies at a profit, workers are expected to make concessions.

With the president and most Democratic leaders expressing confidence in healthcare passage as soon as this week, it's still unclear if the House will have the needed votes to pass it. And if the votes aren't there, it could seriously undermine the chances for any element of the labor and progressive agenda from passing, whether it's a meaningful jobs bill or financial reform or even reviving the now-dormant Employee Free Choice Act to promote a level playing field for organizing.

And with only a handful of online sign-ups, at best, at Organizing for America events in some key swing districts to make phone calls for health reform, it's not clear what kind of clout progressve activists will have now. 

Some labor union leaders are also starting to voice their frustration, at a recent AFL-CIO Executive Council Meeting and public comments by Teamster President James Hoffa. Even so, the union movement and its allies are ramping up last-minute efforts to push healthcare reform across the goal line. But As Dick Meister of Truthout.org quoted Hoffa on the administration,

We obviously hoped that more would have been done. We're disappointed that jobs were not emphasized the first year. We're disappointed that the president got bogged down in the healthcare debate.

Jennifer Laskin, 37, a school teacher who specializes in reading instruction at Renaissance Continuation High School in Watsonville in central California, is fed up with the state of her state. So she's marching with like-minded activists, including Emmanuel Ballesteros, 21, one of her former students, from Bakersfield to Sacramento.
 
“We’re marching to bring attention to the legislative budget issues we have in California, to bring attention to solutions to restore public and social services, to register people to vote and to collect signatures for the Majority Budget Act Initiative,” said Laskin, a member of the Pajaro Valley Federation of Teacher, Local 1936, California Federation of Teachers. “We’re also talking and listening to people along the way to learn what is going on across this state. So far it’s been incredibly sad.”
 
The backdrop to the six-week march is the ongoing recession, which has rapidly decreased tax revenues in California, leading to sharp budget cutbacks throughout the state's education system, from kindergartens through universities. California has a 12.5 percent jobless rate, well above the 9.7 percent nationwide rate.

A few years ago, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) explained the supposed realities of globalization to workers: "We have to be honest with people, delivering a kind of cold wake-up call about the need for change in a fast-shifting economy."

Translation: It is no longer realistic to believe that corporations can afford to reward loyalty and hard work. The burden of change is on you. You are on your own.

This wake-up message was delivered this week to Fond du Lac, Wis. members of the International Association of Machinist Lodge 1947, who produce outboard motors at Mercury Marine. They learned that the Mercury Marine/Brunswick Corp. is granting bonuses to white-collar workers and executives in the wake of enormous pay cuts imposed on production workers last year.

Something is astir in America's heartland. A grassroots coalition of independent farmers, consumer groups, and labor advocates is coming together to challenge the corporations at the top of the country's food chain and reclaim control over the food supply.

A series of public hearings on the agriculture oligopoly led by the Justice Department's antitrust division, has opened the door to a serious national dialogue on food policy reform. On Thursday, food and farm justice advocates gathered at a townhall meeting in Ankeny, Iowa amid chants of “bust up Big Ag” to drum up momentum for today's antitrust meeting, focused on the seed business and the biotech Goliath Monsanto.

In the midst of the healthcare and economic crises, food politics have intensified, with many communities demanding an end to perverse farm subsidies and more equitable nutritional programs. Aside from the more obvious impacts on small farmers and consumers, the food infrastructure's dysfunction is very much embedded in the workforce that sustains the country from the field to the table.

Two Republican senators from Tennesse are doing a big favor for a big company from their home state by fighting unionization rights for drivers at the Memphis-based courier FedEx.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) has pledged to use "every right and privilege I have" to prevent FedEx drivers from organizing. The only reason FedEx can't organize now is because of a legal double stanard.

Other shipping companies like UPS are governed by the National Labor Relations Act, like the vast majority of employers in the United States. Whereas FedEx is subject to the Railway Labor Act, which denies them the basic organizing rights most employees take for granted.

On Monday night, bus drivers for the Crimson Ride service at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa celebrated their first contract with an Ohio-based company, after a brief strike which I wrote about last week.

While the drivers’ strike got national attention thanks in part to Fight Back newspaper and the Network to Fight for Economic Justice, a school nutritionist in Alabama contacted me to point out how many workers in Alabama labor long hours in obscurity for far less than a living wage.

Peter Engstrom is passionate about contributing to the health and well-being of school kids in Huntsville, Ala. But even with a master's degree, he doesn’t earn enough as a cafeteria cook to support a family without working another job as a healthcare attendant. He is part of a living-wage campaign in Huntsville that hopes to follow in the footsteps of campaigns that have gained living-wage ordinances or other measures in other cities.

But as Engstrom describes in this Q & A with Working In These Times, Huntsville workers have a big challenge ahead of them.

Now that President Obama is finally embracing reconciliation and seeking at long last to fire up his base in support of health reform, it's worth asking whether Obama's quest for bipartisanship cost us too much in lost jobs and meaningful health legislation.

And where was all this fiery anti-insurance industry rhetoric from Obama last year when the right-wing dominated messaging? Long after it became clear that the president wasn't going to get any Republican support for his proposals outside of a stray vote or two—whether for his $786 billion economic stimulus bill or for healthcare reform—he and Democrats continued to water down the bills in the search for an elusive 60 votes.

But both the jobs and health bills that have emerged don't fully address the problems they purport to tackle, although there's an emerging view among most progressives that's it's important to pass some form of health reform. But support for current health care proposals remains relatively tepid among progressive activists, and there hasn't been so far a large-scale mobilization among liberals for the sort of big-ticket spending on massive jobs programs needed to start making up for the 11 million jobs lost in the recession. 

As George Packer explains in an important New Yorker article, this was "Obama's lost year"—and his emphasis on fair-minded and inclusive political approaches in D.C. over actually producing results that average people can see has hurt him and Democrats considerably.

Many of us on this blog have been thinking a great deal about the future of labor in the U.S. We have explored the continued abuse of workers and have tried to find and highlight effective organizational strategies that have helped them.

The landscape is not a bright one. Unionization rates are at an all time low for the modern era. Labor law reform seems lost in the “hope” of the last presidential campaign. And unions seem more interested in fighting amongst themselves for scraps than in advancing the cause of workers. In this depressing fog, I have been watching with curiosity a new organization, the Freelancers Union (FU).

Like many, I wasn’t sure what to make of this organization. Not sure even about its name. But it has continued to grow; in the New York City area it has almost 100,000 members, making it one of the largest unions in the city. Its leader, Sara Horowitz, has become a go-to person on the new economy and workforce issues appearing on what seems like every TV and radio show and in countless newspapers.

At first, like many, I was amused. I mean, was this even a “union,” and was Horowitz really a labor leader? So I decided to sit down and talk with Horowitz about her organization, the growth of freelancing and the trend's larger economic ramifications.

Verizon's nationwide effort to sell off its land lines and focus on cellular service has hit a legal bump in Illinois—which is good for customers and telecom workers, because their quality of service and jobs are at risk should the debt-laden deal with Connecticut-based Frontier Communications be approved by regulators.

After hearing the case on the proposed Verizon-Frontier landline sale in Illinois, an administrative law judge (ALJ) with the state's Commerce Commission yesterday recommended rejecting the proposed Verizon-Frontier merger, which would affect more than a half million people throughout Illinois. "The proposed reorganization will diminish Frontier's ability to provide adequate, reliable, efficient, safe and least-cost public utility service," Judge Lisa M. Tapia wrote, mostly because it would leave Frontier with too much debt.

"The ALJ's reasoning is consistent with the positions that our union took and the arguments that we made about the enormous risks this deal poses for consumers and workers," said Jim Bates of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 51, which represents Verizon workers in the area around Springfield, Ill.

For over a decade, Bassem Youssef had distinguished himself as one of the FBI's top Arabic speaking agents. But despite an excellent performance record, he was kept from serving on sensitive projects related to counterterrorism after September 11, 2001.

After Youssef's complaints about possible ethnic discrimination went nowhere, the agency continued to stall on assigning him to a position that matched his expertise—an assignment that he later learned had been approved by the agency, but never implemented. In 2006, an audit by the Department of Justice found that Youssef was the victim of improper retaliation for alleging unfair treatment.

Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds drew even more ire from agency higher-ups when she alleged misconduct and corruption within her agency, including a co-worker she suspected of spying. A 2005 Inspector General's report vindicated Edmonds' case, but too late: “rather than investigate Edmonds' allegations vigorously and thoroughly, the FBI concluded that she was a disruption and terminated her contract.”

Laura Flanders offers a succinct take on the current mood of working families and organized labor, as the recession wears on and President Obama—the man for whom unions spent $200 million during the 2008 election season—fails to deliver on key pieces of labor's agenda.

"Union Families expect more—and top union officials are already expressing strong concerns," Flanders says, referring to leaders' statements at last week's AFL-CIO meeting in Orlando, "that if they don't get more, soon—don't expect them to be able to deliver or Democrats in the fall."

To watch the video at GRITtv at full size, go here. (And as a side note, since I'm a GRIT fan, Flanders' "'F' Word" segment is a regular feature on GRITtv, the daily cable/public TV/satellite/web program she hosts. The show has just taken up residence at its new online home at www.grittv.org. Lookin' good, GRIT!)

By Joseph Varga, South Central Indiana Jobs with Justice

When members of an electrical workers union in Evansville, Ind., decided to stir things up and fight the closing of the Whirlpool plant in their city—which would eliminate 1,100 jobs and move many to Mexico—they realized they had to bring attention to their struggle.

As part of their strategy, IUE/CWA Local 808 members—900 of which work at Whirlpool—decided to stage a rally in late February in front of the plant to stir up public support. They ended up getting help from an unlikely source: Whirlpool Evansville Division’s Vice-President Paul Coburn. With his threat to Evansville employees in an internal employee newsletter that potential employers in the Evansville region might not want to hire union members who attend a rally, Coburn helped bring attention to workers' plight.

Local 808 filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and unions and their supporters have picked up the story. Do an Internet search of his name combined with Whirlpool and Evansville, and you will get an idea of potential forces converging. Now the situation could cause more than just a stir.

University students' national day of action on March 4—focused on soaring tuition which is closing off higher education to poor and working-class students—displayed the largest upsurge in student activism seen in decades.

While the most prominent protests were held in California, actions stretched across the country, including the Midwest. The head of the University of Illinois at Chicago's political science department said he hadn't seen such on-campus emotion since the campus was closed following the 1970 shootings of students at Kent State University, the New York Times reported.

Typifying the clash between an increasingly corporatized vision of the university and the aspirations of working-class students was a raucous confrontation on Thursday at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which resulted in the pepper-spraying of student protesters and the arrest of 15 people, including a student journalist and Student Association President Jay Burseth. (The seemingly unjustified bust was caught on YouTube.)

Burseth and other students requested a meeting with Chancellor Carlos Santiago, a cheerleader for an increasingly corporatized campus, but Santiago refused.

Today, as the world marks the 99th annual International Women's Day, it's clear that the occasion enjoys an aura of mainstream respectability. IWD is an official holiday in 15 countries.

But the radical roots of the IWD have been largely forgotten. Nothing sums up the corporate co-option of the day better than this blog post by Kristin Young of the consumer blog Luxist trumpeting various IWD-themed promotions sponsored by Diane von Furstenberg boutiques:

What's better than shopping and doing some good along the way?

International Woman's Day has always had close ties to the fashion industry. Started in 1909, IWD came to commemorate the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 in which 146 garment workers, all women, either died from the fire or jumped to their death...

Close ties to the fashion industry, indeed.

What do the titans of Wall Street do for an encore after they created the country's worst recession since the 1930s and then conned the U.S. taxpayers out of $14 trillion in loans and guarantees?

On top of all that, big banks and Wall Street firms still hold billions in so-called toxic assets that are now backed by the U.S. government, even as they foreclose on millions of home loans, lobby hard against any financial reforms and refuse to lend to small and mid-size businesses. In fact, bank lending dropped by the biggest amount since 1942, according to a new FDIC report.

What else can they do to destroy the economy and help keep joblessness at near-record levels while raking in billions in bonuses?

How about shaking down cities with costly, toxic "swap deals" supposedly designed to hedge risk for revenue-starved municipalities—and then force them each to pay tens of millions in excess interest payments after the economy tanked. Then the banks further squeeze them to slash services and lay off thousands of cops and other front-line workers.

As U.S. unions and workers struggle to gain or protect living-wage jobs, benefits and the right to organize, it is easy to forget that thousands of workers in this country not only don’t enjoy such basic labor rights, but are actually working quite literally in slavery.

One grassroots group, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, has single-handedly pushed the issue of slavery into public consciousness during the past decade, raising awareness with nationwide campaigns and working with prosecutors to break up human slavery rings.

Their latest and perhaps most visceral contribution is the Florida Modern Day Slavery Museum, a brand-new traveling exhibit housed in a replica of the 24-foot cargo truck where workers were kept in captivity and forced to labor picking tomatoes in south Florida.

By Jennifer Braudaway

It was a big week for educators and transport workers, as activists and workers took to the streets all over the country. As we reported earlier, students and teachers held a massive day of action while Alabama bus drivers stood up for better wages. Also, in Florida, New York and California, NASA workers and TWU members fought for their jobs, while San Francisco bricklayers called for justice.

Transport workers tell MTA to stop robbing MUNI

Hundreds of San Francisco Municipal Railway (MUNI) workers and Transport Workers Union (TWU) members marched through downtown San Francisco on Monday to protest the Municipal Transportation Agency’s (MTA) proposed budget cuts and possible layoffs. The MTA has called for cuts in services, fare hikes and the layoffs of 176 TWU operators. MUNI serves over 700,000 riders a day. On Friday, 15,000 city workers of all stripes received layoff notices. Read more about the protest at IndyBay.org. (See video above)

The latest unemployment report, showing an unemployment rate stuck at 9.7%  in February, offers ambiguous signals about the pace and breadth of the recovery.

The picture is clouded in part by the impact of unprecedented snowfalls in February, which bogged down economic activity in much of the nation.

But more fundamentally, the figures simultaneously show a drastic slowing of job loss—35,000 Americans lost their job last month, compared to 650,000 one year earlier—combined with the troubling persistence of long-term unemployment.

SEATTLE, WASH.—In conjunction with Thursday's national "Day of Action to Defend Public Education," 500 people gathered at the University of Washington's quad here on March 4 to protest cuts to the state's university budgets.

Students congregated at the center of campus, and then moved through the city's University District chanting, “Keep U-W the school we love, not some bullshit country club,” and “They say fee hike, we say let’s strike” to halted traffic and nearby onlookers.

Part of the crowd moved up 45th street, screaming “Take I-5!”, the nearby interstate. But a leader of the march replied, “We don’t have enough people to do that!”

Many University of Alabama students had a hard time getting around Tuscaloosa early this week, but those supporting striking bus drivers definitely didn't mind.

The union bus drivers who ferry students around the school's flagship campus there went on strike at 5 a.m. this past Monday, after months of contentious contract negotiations with the Ohio-based private company, First Transit, which runs the "Crimson Ride" service. (Crimson is one of the schools official colors.)

The Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) drivers say the $9.50 per hour they are paid is not a living wage—and comparably less than what drivers for the same company are paid in other cities. The university pays First Transit $55.50 for each driver work hour; drivers get no pay on university breaks and holidays and have a $10,000 cap on medical benefits.

Drivers went back to the negotiating table with First Transit on Tuesday, to no avail: On Wednesday, the university locked drivers out, "reducing service by two-thirds and sending home drivers who reported for work," Labor Notes reports. Although many of the 60 unionized bus drivers did not honor Monday's strike, during which the university operated "scab vans," some drivers have said they are willing to resume the strike if there is no satisfactory contract outcome. Local media quoted ATU steward Tia Brown:

By R.M. Arrieta

SAN FRANCISCO—Any doubts that the historic statewide education rally held across California yesterday would come up short were wiped out yesterday after tens of thousands of people—students, teachers, administrators, workers, parents—marched and chanted their way across the state, visiting civic centers and plazas and moving through streets.

In San Francisco the mood was largely festive, as students danced and marched. Parents pushed their children in strollers, and dancers on stilts and large puppets bobbed through the throngs of people waving placards and banners as they made their way to the Civic Center from San Francisco's Mission district. 

A large group separated from the main rally and headed to the steps of city hall, where the people inside quickly locked the doors. Chanting “Save our Schools! Save Our Schools!” the group waved signs and held up banners. In Oakland, a splinter group rushed the 880 freeway for nearly an hour, forcing all lanes to a close and backing up rush-hour traffic for a long while. About 150 people were arrested in that incident.

Labor unrest is spreading in the global aviation industry.

On Tuesday, the union that represents pilots at Air Berlin, Germany's second-largest airline, called for a three-hour work stoppage. Last month pilots at the country's largest carrier, Lufthansa, walked off the job for 24 hours. Cabin crews at British Airways are also poised to strike. Greek air traffic controllers announced another work stoppage today to protest the lastest round of public spending cuts.

The U.S. aviation industry is no exception to global trends: American, Continental, United, US Airways and Southwest are all in protracted and contentious negotiations with their respective unions. The airline industry has suffered severe losses during the global recession, but workers are getting tired of being asked to bear the brunt of an unprofitable industry. Unions made painful concessions to keep the industry alive, and workers are rapidly losing patience.

By R.M. Arrieta

A massive movement is rumbling through California today, with support from across the country. Thousands of students, teachers, union members, parents and workers have joined forces to descend on areas throughout the state from north to south, east to west, in a national Day of Action — and outrage.

It comes after months of planning that brought together a coalition of representatives from more than 100 schools, unions and organizations throughout California.

"The California dream is being suffocated by a small group of ultra-conservatives whose only response to public need is:  ‘No. No. No. No,’” said Ken Tray, executive board member and political director of United Educators San Francisco and teacher at Lowell High School in San Francisco.

By Art Levine

After breaking Senator Jim Bunning's one-man roadblock to extending jobless benefits for 30 days, the Senate will be turning next week to a year-long extension in jobless benefits. But even coupled with more business tax breaks, that still won't make much of a dent in finding work for nearly 30 million people who need full-time jobs, critics say.

"It's nickel and dime stuff," says economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, of the proposed jobs package. He welcomed the aid the new $100 billion proposal offers workers but notes, along with others, that it doesn't create the new jobs that need to be created after this recession—nearly 11 million  are required to make up the jobs lost.

What's gone wrong here? The future of the Democratic Party and the economy depend on returning the unemployed to work and slashing the unemployment rate, but, despite high-flying rhetoric, there's no real urgency to do so in Washington in a major way. "We've had this big yelling about the deficit, and Obama gave into that," Baker observes. "We've somehow accepted that we're going to have high unemployment rates—it's 9.7% now— for a long time."