A celebrated broadcast of This American Life that depicted life at one of Apple’s manufacturing plants in China has been retracted. The venerated public radio program said the episode, from monologuist Mike Daisey, was partially fabricated, and that they would address the topic on their weekly broadcast this week. The new episode will feature a [...]

You may have heard about Politico’s gaffe of the year (at least so far), when a reporter confused the Wisconsin state flag, which has the year of the state’s founding, 1848, on it with the flag of the “Wisconsin local 1848″ union. There’s a Google cache of the old story, which was quickly changed. Brian [...]

General Motors, which the Obama Administration rescued in 2009 with bridge loans as it went through a managed bankruptcy, announced a record annual profit in nominal terms, which will earn the union workers at the company a substantial upside benefit. General Motors earned its largest profit ever in 2011, two years after it nearly collapsed [...]

When I first heard about the proposed anti-union laws moving through the Arizona legislature, I was fairly resigned to their passage. Arizona has huge Republican majorities in its legislature, and they already passed a major anti-immigration bill, though they obviously weren’t shy about courting controversy. But then a funny thing happened. The Republicans couldn’t find [...]

Despite fierce opposition from major transit unions, the Senate yesterday gave final approval to the FAA Authorization bill, a five-year extension that removes uncertainty from the FAA, approves a next-generation air traffic monitoring system and, in Harry Reid’s telling, creates hundreds of thousands of jobs. But unions were unhappy about changes to labor law insisted [...]

The Senate will vote as early as today on whether to punish transportation unions in a bid to get Federal Aviation Administration authorization through 2015. The House already passed its version of what negotiators called a bipartisan compromise. But unions object to the deal and have gotten more vocal about it in recent days. The [...]

Before moving on to Arizona, let’s note that Indiana will soon become the nation’s 23rd right-to-work state, after the state Senate passed a revised bill to that effect. The bill now can go to Governor Mitch Daniels for his signature. Lawmakers voted Wednesday to make Indiana the Rust Belt’s first right-to-work state, passing legislation that [...]

Many observers would look at the Wisconsin uprising and think that the Republicans made a catastrophic mistake. They re-energized the opposition in the state, created a powerful grassroots machine, lost two state Senators through recall, and now their Governor faces a recall election. But that’s short-term thinking. After fits and starts, and backed by a [...]

A collection of 18 transportation unions have demanded that Congress reject a compromise measure on the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Authorization bill which they say will hurt unions. Unions like the United Auto Workers, United Steelworkers, Teamsters, the International Association of Machinists, the Association of Flight Attendants (CWA) and more object to several hidden provisions [...]

The John Doe investigation swirling around Scott Walker in Wisconsin has begun to become a factor in his recall election. The labor-backed progressive group We Are Wisconsin has called for the resignations of two current Walker staffers, who exhibited some of the same behavior that drew indictments for former aides. The group called on Brett [...]

This isn’t how conservatives wanted things to play out. They wanted to use the post-Tea Party period as a time to crush union membership. They sought out a coordinated strategy, in places like Wisconsin and Ohio and Indiana and Tennessee and Oklahoma and Idaho, to roll back and bust up unions. And despite all that, [...]