Metro Washington Council AFL-CIO

Solidarity Center Report: Student Death Launches Uzbekistan’s Forced Labor Season

9/30/2016

At least one person has died in Uzbekistan cotton fields so far this season, part of the country’s massive mobilization of compulsory labor in which more than 1 million nurses, teachers, students and state employees are forced, through systematic coercion, to leave clinics and classrooms and toil for weeks picking cotton. Says one university student forced into the cotton fields: "You work like a slave from morning till night, not enough food, and should sleep and wake up hungry again.” Read more at the Solidarity Center.

Union Voice/Readers Write: Women Unite!

9/30/2016

“The article ‘The Power of Black Women in Elections’ says it all,” writes Jim Kennedy. “Perhaps the Obama Coalition is not being re-formed BUT a newer powerful coalition IS coming together. One comprised of women of all colors of all ages, led by black and hispanic women as the core and reinforced by middle class white women from both parties, none of whom can afford to sit this election out. Men like me have failed. I sense this new coalition can and will succeed where we have not. It should have happened years ago. Better late than never. Their own future and ours and that of our children is in their hands and I can't think of a better group to save us all. You go girls.”

Today in Labor History

9/30/2016

Mother Jones organizes the wives of striking miners in Arnot, Pennsylvania to descend on the mine with brooms, mops and clanging pots and pans...black farmers meet in Elaine, Arkansas to establish the Progressive Farmers and Householders Union to fight for better pay and higher cotton prices...Cesar Chavez, with Dolores Huerta, co-founds the National Farm Workers Association...Read more
- compiled/edited by David Prosten at Union Communication Services.

Today’s Labor Quote: Dolores Huerta

9/30/2016

“Professional farmworkers who know how to do a number of different jobs, whether it be pruning or picking or crafting, they see themselves as professionals, and they take a lot of pride in that work. They don't see themselves as doing work that is demeaning.”

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