By Joe Maniscalco

This week, California farmworkers protesting the recent death of 57-year-old Jaime Alanís García after he broke his neck fleeing militarized ICE agents in Ventura County on July 10, chose to observe the “Huelga para la dignidad,” or “Strike for Dignity.” Most, however, did not.

And the reason they did not has everything to do with Trump administration policies designed to perpetuate an unrepresented class of workers in this country consigned to a state of virtual slavery.

By Bob Hennelly

The tragic death of Jaime Alanis, a farmworker, who was frightened into hiding when federal ICE agents laid siege to a state-licensed cannabis farm in the agricultural area of Ventura County, needs to prompt more of a response from organized labor that registers nationally.

By Phil Cohen

Editor’s Note: This is Part III of Phil’s bittersweet story of the Local 1077 Whiteville Choir. Read Part I here and Part II here. 

Two weeks later I made my annual pilgrimage to the Great Labor Arts Exchange in Washington, this time accompanied by Melvin Chambers who was treated like a celebrity. One of the guests handed her song lyrics written by an anonymous composer during the recent Detroit Newspaper strike, explaining that the words were set to the legendary pop song, “Dancing in the Street.”

By Phil Cohen

Editor’s Note: This is Part II of Phil’s bittersweet story of the Local 1077 Whiteville Choir. Part I is here.

A few weeks later I drove to AMI Recording in Burlington with the master and graphics in hand, making sure the owners understood I was going to be a significant, ongoing customer if they met my demands. I placed a rush order for five-hundred copies to be picked up in time for the choir’s new album to make its debut at the union’s Southern Regional convention in Atlanta on June 7. The cost came to $675 and including studio time and various miscellaneous charges, the project was only $300 over budget.

By Phil Cohen

Editor’s Note: This is Part I of Phil’s bittersweet story of the Local 1077 Whiteville Choir.

During April 1995, the North Carolina District of ACTWU held its yearly conference in Greensboro’s spacious union hall. The delegates and staff were blown away by the choir providing entertainment. The twenty-three singers and one electric keyboard player named Kenneth Stanley all worked at the Whiteville Apparel suit factory in Eastern North Carolina and were members of Local 1077.

By Steve Wishnia

More than 100 days after he was abducted from Maryland by ICE agents and shipped to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is still in jail. After nearly three months of using lies and stalling to evade court orders for his release, the Trump junta brought him back to face highly questionable federal charges of human trafficking.

By Joe Maniscalco

Walmart, the largest employer of women and people of color in the nation didn’t exactly have a stellar track record on racial equity before the family-controlled operation decided to roll back its Diversity, Equity, Inclusion programs in the wake of the Trump administration’s DEI vendetta.

By Steve Wishnia

“I’m somewhat surprised to see this hearing kept on the schedule,” Marc Freedman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce told an Occupational Safety and Health Administration panel June 16, the first day of two weeks of hearings on federal heat-safety rules proposed by the Biden administration last year. President Donald Trump suspended consideration of all pending regulations in an executive order Jan. 20.

By Joe Maniscalco

In 2018, my partner and I found ourselves in Paris, France on the eighth day of the burgeoning Yellow Vest Movement navigating the bonfires openly burning along Franklin Delano Roosevelt Avenue.

By Bob Hennelly

In our current dystopian circumstance, it's hard to sort out the signal from the static. The barrage of Trump assaults on science, human rights, public health, global humanitarian aid, as well as on democracy and the rule of law itself make it near impossible to get our collective equilibrium.

By Joe Maniscalco

Songs have always been integral to working class struggle and the broader labor movement overall. Think of your favorite anthems from Odetta, Phil Ochs, Woody Guthrie, or Bob Dylan and their amazing ability to instantly invoke the spirit of solidarity in anybody listening.

Work-Bites

Hello Work-Bites Builders! Today we kick off a new weekly cartoon series from Work-Bites friends and contributors Tim Sheard and Ryn Gargulinski. ‘That’s Outrageous!’ imagines an ongoing mock debate portraying two very different political ideologies…

WAR STORIES By Phil Cohen

I returned to New York in 1979 after a year of traveling across Asia, accompanied by woman named Faye. I found an apartment in Sunnyside, Queens, a working-class neighborhood bordering Long Island City, and resumed driving taxis. But my new friend was a country girl and terrified of the urban environment.

By Joe Maniscalco

As author Len Shindel says in the introduction to The Strike That Changed Maryland’s Wilderness County, he was “intent on getting some of the real dirt and gravel on the 1970 strike.”

By Joe Maniscalco

Patricia Hills, PhD and professor Emerita at Boston University’s Department of History of Art & Architecture, spent her entire academic and curatorial career helping to open up some of the top museums and cultural institutions in the nation to women, people of color, the poor, and other marginalized communities—everything the Trump administration is now attempting to roll back.