For nearly a decade a major battle has been waged over conditions in coke plants. While the steel industry has resisted clean-up efforts tooth and nail, the United Steel Workers of America (USWA), prodded by rank-and-file coke oven workers, has won definite improvements in conditions in coke plants. Still, most plants...
Tag - labor organizing
The "magical year" 1968 initiated a trend in Holland toward democratization, especially within the university. One of the results of the student movement that brought about many such changes at the university was the Science Shop, whose development we wish to describe in this article.
Summer in northern Ohio is Tomato Heaven. Migrant farmworkers from Florida and the Rio Grande valley in Texas move up to work the fields each summer. These workers, the backbone of much of the food industry, are offered housing with no inside plumbing—water must be carried from a common building. Light in rooms is...
The organizing done by nurses in the last few years shows that we are learning from the examples set by service and technical workers. We will use the same tactics as they do. But our organizing experience has been held back by the influence of the professional associations. Nurses have yet to recognize that these...
In late August 1975, I took a job at Preterm, an outpatient abortion and gynecology clinic in Brookline. Having searched for a job since my graduation from UMass-Boston four months previously, I felt very lucky to be working at all and particularly in a women's health clinic. I began as a receptionist, learned the...
In Boston, resistance to medical expansion dates back to student-community coalitions that emerged during the political activism of the late 1960s and is an example where student protest led to sustained community organizing. Successes in controlling the expansion of medical centers or other large urban institutions...
At Lucas Aerospace Corporation in Britain, workers have made specific, detailed demands that go beyond the usual material ones. These demands, if implemented, have the potential of seriously challenging the present economic system. The overall goal of their plan is to guarantee all workers meaningful jobs producing...
The Clamshell Alliance, an umbrella organization of 15 anti-nuclear groups, was formed at a July meeting of 50 people, almost all of whom were NH residents. The goal of the Alliance is the halt of Seabrook construction and to force PSC to cancel the project by employing any means necessary "within the context of non...
On November 30, 1973, 200 employees from George Washington University Hospital demonstrated in the hospital lobby to demand that the hospital administrator arrange for a Union 1199 representation election for approximately 750 clerical, technical, and nursing personnel. After refusing to meet with a delegation from...
In our initial enthusiasm for a women's movement, it seemed to us as if our common experiences as women — the expectation that we would all be housewives, our lower pay, the degrading use of our bodies in a thousand different ways — were so overwhelming that we could overcome all other divisions which split us up...