Harold Meyerson

On Tuesday, May 3, 167 of the AFL-CIO’s 426 employees reported to work to find that their positions had been eliminated. Whole divisions were being scrapped, publications abolished, programs terminated. Some departments were being consolidated, and 61 new positions being created within them, but the house that Federation President John Sweeney had built was, by […]

If you look at Antonio Villaraigosa’s resume line-by-line, you’d conclude that, time and again, he bought that one-way ticket to political Palookaville. It wasn’t his doing that he grew up in the projects in East L.A. But after that, his choices: agitating for immigrant workers (in the 1970s, when this interested nobody but the fringe […]

When Miguel Contreras became leader of the Los Angeles labor movement back in 1996, he inherited a set of time-honored axioms about life and politics under the Southern California sun. The first was that nobody actually worked in campaigns — walking precincts, making phone calls. The state and the city were too big for anyone […]

“Yesterday was a motherfucker,” one AFL-CIO staffer commented this Wednesday, referring to Tuesday’s announcements that the federation would eliminate 167 of the AFL-CIO’s 426 positions (61 new positions will also be created). And in a bitterly divided labor movement, that sentiment might be one of the few statements on which all sides can agree. It’s […]

A man and his rainbow appeared Thursday on a new 37-cent stamp. “Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue,” reads the text, alongside the portrait and name of its author: Yip Harburg. There was no reference to a rainbow in L. Frank Baum’s classic novel, “The Wizard of Oz.” But Harburg, the lyricist whom producer […]

The markets are anxious. There’s every sign that the world’s investors have grown nervous about the continued ability of the American consumer to keep the economy perking along. Companies that sell big-ticket items are floundering: General Motors reported a $1.1 billion quarterly loss yesterday. Conversely, drug and utility stocks are doing all right; companies that […]

It may be just about the most inspiring sight imaginable: hundreds of thousands of people gathered in the main square of some capital city, demanding democratic self-rule. “They’re doing it in many different corners of the world,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said last week, “places as varied as Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan and, on the […]

At first glance, it looked to be a triumph of the human spirit. There, at a joint news conference last week in Jerusalem, stood the patriarchs of the rival faiths of the Middle East — Israel’s chief rabbis, the deputy mufti of Jerusalem, leaders of the Catholic and Armenian churches — Jews, Muslims, and Christians, […]

Spreading democracy is one thing. But do we really want America to be known for spreading the pricing practices of our drug companies? In Guatemala, the United States has become the sales rep for the pharmaceutical industry. Citing urgent public health concerns, the Guatemalan legislature enacted a law last year that permitted the marketing of […]