@LRToday Morning Round-Up: April 4, 2012
"About 40,000 AT&T workers may strike if talks fail" -- Chicago Tribune
About 40,000 AT&T Inc workers or 15 percent of employees could walk off the job as early as Sunday after giving their union the authority to call a strike, if labor negotiations on a range of issues from healthcare costs to job security turn sour.
The Communications Workers of America said on Tuesday that workers had voted to authorize a strike in case it fails to reach an agreement with AT&T by midnight on Saturday April 7 when four labor contracts expire.
"What MLK Would Do: How to make labor organizing a civil right." -- Slate
...Wednesday marks the 44th anniversary of the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tenn., where he’d gone to support a strike by black sanitation workers. In talking with the strikers, King suggested they were “going beyond purely civil rights questions to questions of human rights” by raising “the economic issue.” People should have the right not only to sit at a lunch counter but also the right to afford a hamburger, he told the audience.
Why has the nation advanced on King’s vision of racial equality and moved backward on his goal of economic equality? In part, the different trajectories can be explained by the difference between the laws governing civil rights and labor organizing. Compare the records of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and you see that the former has done little to protect workers while the latter has been quite successful in diminishing discrimination.
"US Airways Pushes Merger" -- Wall Street Journal (paid)
US Airways Group Inc. has told some American Airlines creditors that merging the two carriers could yield more than $1.5 billion a year in added revenue and cost savings, said people familiar with the matter, as it courts support for its push to combine the companies.
The talks between US Airways and creditors of AMR Corp., American's parent, could amount to an end-run around AMR's efforts to negotiate a plan with its unions and bondholders to emerge from bankruptcy protection as an independent airline.
"Could Obama have buyer’s remorse?" -- Washington Post
The White House may have another reason to regret those recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board back in January.
Aside from royally ticking off Republicans, the move to bypass Congress and install a handful of nominees seems to have installed a Trojan horse on the board. Terence Flynn, a Republican who was one of the White House’s recess appointments, is accused of sharing inside information about the board with private-sector friends, including Mitt Romney’s top labor adviser.
