WHAT WE'RE READING: Ethiopian immigrants turn job niche into labor activism; 2 Big Labor Unions Share Efforts to Gain Power and Scale

​Ethiopian immigrants turn job niche into labor activism: In his native Ethiopia, Bert Bayou was a middle-class professional with a United Nations job. But like tens of thousands of his countrymen, he left his war-torn homeland to start over in the United States. Arriving in Washington in 2001, he used the immigrant grapevine to find low-wage jobs in parking garages and coffee shops where other Ethiopians worked. Today Bayou, 38, is a labor union official in the District and the veteran of a successful campaign to improve job conditions for garage workers. Now, his union is hoping to organize another niche of Ethiopian employment: the restaurants and newsstands at Reagan National and Dulles International airports. - The Washington Post; photo: Katherine Frey/The Washington Post
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2 Big Labor Unions Share Efforts to Gain Power and Scale: The leaders of two of the nation’s biggest, most powerful labor unions — the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — are completing a plan that calls for unusually close cooperation in political campaigning, organizing and bargaining in states and cities across the United States. The effort begins a process that could lead to a merger of the two organizations, an outcome that would create the nation’s largest labor union, with some 3.6 million members. - The New York Times, May 5

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