It’s been eight years since his death, but I can still see him and hear him, a wiry, gray-haired, hawk-nosed man. I see him pacing restlessly back and forth behind the podium at union meetings, nervously twirling a gavel, puffing incessantly on a cigarette. I hear him calling on members in the broad accent of […]
It began at 10 o’clock on that morning of April 20, 1914, in the southern Colorado town of Ludlow. National guardsmen, professional gunmen and others high on a hillside unleashed a deadly stream of machine-gun and rifle fire into a tent colony below that housed some 1000 striking coal miners and their families. Strikers grabbed […]
It’s a dramatic, shocking and violent film. Some 200 uniformed policemen armed with billy clubs, revolvers and tear gas angrily charge an unarmed crowd of several hundred striking steelworkers and their wives and children who are desperately running away. The police club those they can reach, shoving them to the ground and ignoring their pleas […]
Like every other fan of the National Pastime, I’ve looked forward with great anticipation to the new baseball season. But I know it won’t possibly match my favorite season of all time. It was 1950 — the year that I, a 17-year-old shortstop not yet out of high school in San Francisco, took the first […]
I hope we can all pause and reflect on the extraordinary life of a true American hero on Tuesday (March 31). It’s Cesar Chavez Day, proclaimed by President Obama and observed throughout the country on the 88th birth date of the late founder of the United Farm Workers union. It’s an official state holiday in […]
Finally, serious steps are being taken to curtail baseball’s deadly chewing tobacco habit — proposed legislation that would ban its use throughout California beginning next year. The great need for a ban should be obvious. Chewing tobacco is highly addictive, slovenly, disgusting, repulsive. It causes cancer that can eat away at your throat, mouth, lips, […]
The Fourth of July, as we all know, is Independence Day. Hurray for George Washington and the revolutionaries, down with King George and the British. That sort of thing. But have you ever wondered what it’s like on the other side? Have you ever celebrated the Fourth across the border in Canada, in that territory […]
However the new baseball season turns out, it won’t possibly match my favorite season of all time. That’s the season of 1950, the year that I, a 17-year-old shortstop not yet out of high school in San Francisco, took the first step toward what I was certain would be major league stardom. You had to […]
Labor Day. Time again for politicians and union adherents to praise organized labor. Time again for others to pontificate about the supposed decline and growing irrelevance of unions as they continue to lose members and continue to argue among themselves over the future direction of the labor movement. Time again for most other people to […]
It’s Black History Month, a good time to honor the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, one of the most important yet too often overlooked leaders in the long struggle for racial equality and union rights. The union, the first to be founded by African Americans, was involved deeply in political as well as economic activity, […]
The country’s 2-million-plus home care workers have been waiting a whole year now for President Obama to make good on his promise to grant them the federal minimum wage and overtime pay protections they so badly need. The need for immediate presidential action was made abundantly clear in a letter to the White House on […]