Federal unions applauded last week’s ruling by the National Labor Relations Board ending three years of outsourcing work from the United States Postal Service to Staples.
Dena Briscoe, president of the DC-area local of American Postal Workers Union, called the victory "A long time coming," and said that "It's good for the public, the workers and the agency. It's always best to have qualified workers handling the public's mail." On today's labor calendar, Sarah Jaffe (Ja-fee) talks about her new book “Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt” today at noon at the AFL-CIO. If you’re wondering what happened in 2016, this talk is a good place to start to get some answers. For all the latest local labor calendar listings, go to dclabor.org and click on Calendar. In today’s labor joke, a business owner decided to take a tour around his operation and see how things were going. At the shipping docks he saw a young man leaning against the wall doing nothing. The owner walked up to the young man and said, "Son, how much do you make a day?" The guy replied "$200." The owner pulled out his wallet, gave him $200, and told him to get out and never come back. A few minutes later, a shipping clerk asked the owner, "Have you seen the UPS driver? I asked him to wait here for me." Here’s today's labor history: On this date in 1912, the IWW-organized “Bread & Roses” textile strike of 32,000 women and children began in Lawrence, Massachusetts. It lasted 10 weeks and ended in victory. The first millworkers to walk out were Polish women, who, upon collecting their pay, exclaimed that they had been cheated and promptly abandoned their looms. In 1936, nearly two weeks into a sit-down strike at GM’s Fisher Body Plant No. 2 in Flint, Michigan, in what became known as the “Battle of the Running Bulls,” workers battled police when they tried to prevent the strikers from receiving food deliveries from thousands of supporters on the outside. The battle pitted strikers throwing nuts, bolts, door hinges and other auto parts against police firing buckshot from riot guns. And in 1995, National Hockey League owners ended a player lockout that had gone for three months and ten days. A key issue was owner insistence on a salary cap, which they won. Today’s labor quote is by Rose Schneiderman “The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. Help, you women of privilege, give her the ballot to fight with.” Schneiderman was a prominent US union leader, socialist, and feminist in the first part of the twentieth century.
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