When employees at the steel manufacturer LTV cheered the resignation last November of the corporation’s chief executive–he had been brought in only a year earlier to save the company–it was a telling sign. Steelworkers, who bristled at CEO William Bricker’s continuing campaign to slash their wages and cut off health insurance for retirees, had become […]
David Moberg
David Moberg is a senior editor at In These Times.
Posted inFeatures
Union Cities
A little over a year ago, 100 workers tried to form a union at Transit Express, a low-wage Milwaukee company that the county government pays to transport disabled people. Their employer put up surveillance cameras, hired security guards, distributed anti-union literature, and gave workers a pay hike–which he warned they could lose if they voted […]
Posted inFeatures
HERE’s Hard Times:
Late last year, Nicole Howard was laid off when Montgomery Ward went bankrupt. In the spring, she happily found a new job cleaning rooms at Chicago’s venerable Palmer House Hilton Hotel. But on September 14, she says, her boss “just told me that because of what happened on September 11, they had to lay people […]
Posted inFeatures
Martha Jernegons’s New Shoes
Last fall, Martha Jernegons got a raise. By the standards of the new dot-com economy, it wasn’t much–just $2.15 per hour. But for Jernegons, a 56-year-old home health care aide in Chicago, working for a private agency that is reimbursed by the city, it was a 40 percent increase, to $7.60 an hour. Though she […]
Posted inCivil Rights in America
Can Democracy Save Chicago’s Schools?
With much fanfare, Chicago has moved to decentralize control of what some have called the worst public school system in America. But reform has been financially and politically crippled from the start.