On Friday morning, a group of picketers gathered outside the reality TV production company Atlas Media—among them, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka and Writers Guild of America East executive director Lowell Peterson. The protest was in support of negotiations ongoing with Atlas Media to provide its writers with health care. “When Workers Get Sick, Atlas Shrugs,” Read More
ALBANY—Donors can do a twofer next week.
The New York AFL-CIO is hosting its annual labor dinner at the Sheraton Towers hotel next Thursday evening, the same night Andrew Cuomo is holding a birthday party fund-raiser in the same hotel.
“It’s strictly a coincidence,” Mario Cilento, a spokesman for the labor group, said. “We’ve Read More
SARANAC LAKE—It did come down to a battle of the boots here in the 23rd Congressional district, and the unions which aligned by Bill Owens at the last minute are touting their victory.
“The late labor candidate won,” said Ron McDougall, the president of the Jefferson-Lewis-St. Lawrence Central Labor Council (and the husband Read More
PLATTSBURGH—The door to Bill Owens’ Durkee Street war room is marked with marker on a white board, probably because it was working against him until this Saturday.
I found half a dozen members of NYSUT and the AFL-CIO there, making calls in a fourth-floor conference center next to a pile of glossy door-hangers, water bottles Read More
ALBANY—In August, Larry Bulman wasn’t convinced Bill Owens would win his race to replace John McHugh in Congress.
“It’s simple: boots on the ground,” Bulman, the Saratoga County Democratic chairman and the political director for the plumbers and steamfitters union, told me over lunch. “Which means union support. That’s how we won Read More
ALBANY—Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who pushed for a tax increase on high income earners in this year's budget, just said he doesn't see another hike as part of the solution to New York's latest mid-year budget gap.
"I don't think tax increases are on the table," Silver told Fred Dicker in Read More
ALBANY—Strong support from organized labor unions was a crucial ingredient in the victory of Democrat Scott Murphy in a special House election earlier this year. How big a factor will labor be in the race to replace Representative John McHugh?
"Right now there hasn't been a whole lot of feedback as Read More
ALBANY—It's not quite a
"We're going to go way past the voting record. We're going to see what a legislator's position on other issues beyond labor," said Alan Lubin, the executive vice president of New York State United Teachers, a powerful lobbying group.
NYSUT has not endorsed any legislators as yet, Read More
It's easy enough to ridicule Wednesday's "tea party" protests as a top-down partisan propaganda effort unconvincingly dressed up as an organic grass-roots outpouring.
And it's just as easy to mock the Republican partisans who organized and hyped the protests for their irrational hypocrisy: These are the same folks who lionize Ronald Reagan Read More
The reaction to Wednesday’s ‘tea party’ protests shouldn’t be anger or finger-pointing, but rather a shrug and a Read More
