John Funiciello

Mark Thompson interviews John FUniciello 7pm ET – Thursday, May 21st It’s indelibly etched in the mind. The U.S. Senate Finance Committee had a hearing on health care reform and left out one option that the American people seem to want – single-payer universal health care. On May 5, when several people stood up to…

May Day was observed enthusiastically around the world by millions of workers, in many different ways—except for the U.S. Perhaps, that should read around the world and a few places in America. Even though it was started by American workers and was a uniquely American holiday, it struck fear in the hearts of the people…

In the bad old days, employers across the board were able to hire and fire at will and the workers did not have a thing to say about it and there was no recourse to the wielding of this supreme power in the workplace. Today, most employers still have the right to fire for any…

Organized labor in America is looking forward to the possible reunification of its fractured federation with the announced retirement a few weeks ago of John Sweeney as president of the AFL-CIO. Since the withdrawal of seven of the federation’s unions and the formation of Change to Win (CtW), a rival federation, about five years ago,…

They hardly know where to begin, the Republicans. There are so many things they are against, they could be on the talking heads TV shows on three shifts instead of just two. But, if there’s one thing that the GOP does best, it’s fear-mongering. They started in on the new administration with the former vice…

The Hearst Corporation’s newspaper in New York’s capital has cancelled the contract of a union that has had one since the National Labor Relations Act allowed workers to unionize in America. George Hearst, publisher of the Times Union in Albany, cancelled the contract of Newspaper Guild Local 34 last week and said that he hoped…

There never has been really free trade. We’re told by our government, its politicians, and Corporate America that there is such a thing as “free trade” and we have to do everything in our power to protect the “free” part in our new global enterprise. We’re also told that, if we question the purposes or…

The warnings started to become more specific and in some detail decades ago: If we continued on the same course and used the same economic model, we were going to face certain economic disaster. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist or even an economist to see that disaster was on the horizon. Rank-and-file…

While millions of Americans are waiting for their first unemployment check or the knock on the door by a sheriff’s deputy bearing an eviction notice, there are people in other parts of the world for whom the economic collapse has them wondering how long they and their children can survive. This deep recession, tending toward…