Click here to check out this week's Labor History Today podcast. Ed Meese, attorney general in the Ronald Reagan administration, urges employers to begin spying on workers "in locker rooms, parking lots, shipping and mail room areas and even the nearby taverns" to try to catch them using drugs – 1986 The fishing boat Andrea Gail, out of Gloucester, Mass., is caught in ferocious storm and lost at sea with her crew of six. The event inspired the book, “The Perfect Storm,” by Sebastian Junger, and a film by the same name. The city of Gloucester has lost more than 10,000 whalers and fishermen to the sea over its 350-year history - 1991 Compiled/edited by Union Communication Services A takeback pushed through by The Washington Post during the last round of contract negotiations is fueling a push for union membership at the Washington Baltimore News Guild.Under the new contract, the Post no longer gives additional pay to workers who take on additional responsibilities for a higher job classification on a part-time basis. “A typical news aide who keeps the copier machines running, edits comment threads in stories, sifts through reader tiplines and designs layouts for print has suffered a 10- to 15-percent pay cut,” unit co-chair Frederick Kunkle reported in a post on the Guild’s Facebook page. “We regret that we were not able to save this feature in our contract,” Kunkle added. “Remember that the wisest way to preserve important benefits – and possibly achieve better terms and benefits in the future – is to work together. Collective bargaining is only as strong as the people who join together to push the company to do right by its employees.” photo: at the November, 2017 NewsGuild demo at the Washington Post; photo by Chris Garlock/Union City If you missed last week's episode of Your Rights At Work (Thursdays on WPFW 89.3FM from 1-3pm), catch it on your favorite podcast app (search for Union City Radio) or click here. The expanded show featured Unite Here 7 organizer Tracy Lingo on the Marriott strike, Alex Baptiste from the National Partnership for Women and Families, on “Miscarrying at Work: The Physical Toll of Pregnancy Discrimination, "Union Blood" the latest song by SpudWrench, the singing elevator engineer, plus Tim Schlittner, co-host of the AFL-CIO's new “State of the Unions.” podcast and Georgetown University graduate student workers Hailey Huget and Kevin Carriere, members of the Georgetown Alliance of Graduate Employees (GAGE). While helping farmworkers organize into unions in Mexico’s northern coastal state of Baja California, Abelina Ramírez (right) holds workshops on labor rights, including gender equality. Ramírez, who has picked berries for 13 years in the region after migrating from her home in the country's southern Oaxaca region, says it is important for farm workers "to realize that together, we can join forces and go up against the employers and the government and get a better life for ourselves and our families.” Read more at the Solidarity Center. photo credit: Solidarity Center/Kate Conradt |