For nearly 16 years the workers at Smithfield in North Carolina have fought hard for a union. This week they ratified their first ever contract ... if there was ever a question as to why we need the Employee Free Choice Act, it would be in the telling of this story.

You can help UnionReview.com continue as a vibrant online interactive community of working people by making a small donation to the site today. There are interesting new things that I can do with this site and the community if the funds were there. For now, just about everything on the site comes out of my own pocket -- but boy can I use a hand now. Read below for some more details.

The U.S. unemployment rate increased to 9.5 percent in June, a 26-year high, and up slightly from 9.4 percent in May. Some 467,000 jobs were lost in June, according to data released today by the Department of Labor.

This was posted first on the AFL-CIO Now Blog here.

This is being cross-posted from the SEIU Blog. I thought to put up here for our friends in Pennsylvania providing direct patient care.

Workers at Prime-Time Shuttle in Los Angeles, California unanimously ratified a three-year agreement for their first Teamster contract on June 26, 2009. The workers voted 22-0 to have Teamsters Local 952 in Orange, California as their representative approximately five years ago.

Building Bridges: Your Community and Labor Report

National Edition

Produced by Ken Nash and Mimi Rosenberg **************************************

Warehouse Workers United is a Change to Win campaign aimed at the economic crisis in the logistics industry. I visited the web site and learned there was a study performed earlier this year conducted by two people from the University of California: Edna Bonacich, Professor Emeritus in Sociology and Ethnic Studies, and Juan David De Lara, PhD candidate in Geography.

Kim Wrightson has always believed that if you are going to improve your lot in life, you do it through hard work and dedication – no one in this world is going to hand anything to you.

That’s why Wrightson, a bus driver at Durham School Services in Elgin, Illinois, and her fellow workers decided to take control of their own future by organizing with the Teamsters Union earlier this year. When management got wind of the group’s intention to organize, it launched an aggressive anti-union campaign. Wrightson and her co-workers had the whole playbook thrown at them leading up to the election – from threats and intimidation to outright lies about the union, the company held nothing back.

There are reports of Al Franken winning the Democratic Senate seat from Minnesota ... this one first appeared on on the AFL-CIO Now Blog

The Minnesota Supreme Court, after nearly eight months of counting and appeals, has ruled that Al Franken won the election to be Minnesota’s next U.S. senator.

Today I was asked to post an article Teamster General President Hoffa wrote to Daily Kos, it is here. In this piece we are looking into the fact that a tax hike on health benefits to pay for health care reform is a bitter, bitter pill for middle-class wage-earners to swallow. The comments on Kos run the gamut, as they do often -- but one person asked if the unions were exempt (an article recently ran in Bloomberg about this issue). The blogger asked for a response and we wrote back:

The difference between being in a union and being non-union is that a union worker has a contract. A contract is an exchange of promises for the breach of which the law will provide a remedy.

As a rule, labor is against any tax on health care benefits whether a collective bargaining agreement is in place or not. That said, unions collectively bargain for wages and benefits with the understanding that workers will forgo raises to maintain benefits, especially in the economic climate they are faced with today. In some instances, especially of late, workers agree to wage freezes and even givebacks with the understanding that they will maintain benefits they have bargained for over the years. Under the Baucus plan, once a collective bargaining agreement expires, workers will negotiate a new contract with the understanding that new rules apply and they can proceed accordingly.

This would not be the first time collectively bargained benefits have been grandfathered when there has been a change in federal law and it is disingenuous to act as if this is just coming into play under the Obama administration and his health care plan.

A union contract IS the union difference.

Click through to read the piece Hoffa wrote.

This was a difficult week where we watched a fatal train accident in Washington, DC take nine lives (three of which are known union members), and injured many others. Before most of us could absorb that, we heard about entertainers dying one after another. There was a weird cloud over the news of a Governor using state money to see his mistress in Argentina, Iran clamping down on her citizens seeking democracy and ... the list goes on. On UnionReview.com a lot of new correspondents took up the challenge to report and post on things they are working with -- in fact, most of the stories that hit the site in the last week came from others. For that, I say thank you and ask you to keep up the excellent work.

If you missed anything that hit the site in the last week, here are all the stories archived in one place. As always, feel free to comment, copy and paste to your own sites, and pass this stuff along.

The train accident in DC on Monday night of this week left a lot of people in the area with a bag of nerves. I am one of those commuters. I take the Red Line twice a day to get to work. Though I am glad I wasn't on there during the accident, my heart goes out to the nine people who died and the countless others who were injured.

I went to the Doctor the other day. After the $30 copay, 3 new prescriptions and a Dr's request that I head to Radiology and for blood work for two new tests, I decided that maybe I needed to re-think health care.

I have good health insurance.

I pay way too much every two weeks, but there is just no choice for me and my family. I have to have insurance, even as inadequate as it is.

Today, as I sit typing, I'm thinking about the two phone calls from CVS for me to come by and pick up the new medications and I know I can't.

It feels a little odd saying this out loud, or in writing. No matter how I say it or in what venue, it makes me feel like a failure. You see, I can't afford the medication.

Can't afford it.

Yesterday it was announced that attorneys general in eight states took a stand against FedEx Ground for its rampant misclassification of workers.

Rite Aid workers charged their employer with "abusive, disrespectful, and illegal treatment" at the company's annual shareholder meeting in New York City on Thursday morning, June 25.
 
Standing up for employees at the company's annual meeting was veteran Rite Aid employee Angel Warner, who attended representing 600 of her co-workers at the company's massive million-square-foot distribution center in the high-desert community of Lancaster, California, located about 60 miles from Los Angeles.