Earlier this week the workers at Shaw's Supermarket's Methuen, Massachusetts distribution center went on strike. The warehouse, which employs about 310 employees, who are members of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 791, distributes perishables to most of the company's 194 New England locations.

This was sent in to UR from USW President Leo Gerard.

Sen. Jim Bunning, the Kentucky Republican who single-handedly delayed unemployment benefits for 400,000 desperate Americans and forced an unnecessary furlough of another 2,000, should be a figure regarded with wonderment.

This is being cross-posted from MassLaborNews.com. You can read the original piece here. 

UFCW Local 1459 gathered with some 70 workers including at least nine other local unions at a Springfield Stop and Shop hiring hall on Friday afternoon. The union and its labor allies held an information picket to draw attention to Stop & Shop's confrontational plan to use replacement workers if there is a strike.

The following report was sent to UR this morning from the Transit Workers Union. This piece also appears at the union's web site here.

The TWU joined community activists, fellow unions, the AFL-CIO, small business owners and elected officials this weekend to save thousands of jobs. The rally in Titusville, Florida was organized by the AFL-CIO in response to the Obama administration's proposed budget cut for NASA's Constellation program, and as part of its campaign for jobs in America.

President Leo Gerard of the USW sat down for a discussion with Richard McCormack, the editor and publisher of Manufacturing & Technology News, a publication he created in 1994. This entry is their full discussion.

Spirit pilots, represented by the Air Line Pilots Association, Int’l (ALPA), concluded mediated talks with the company on February 18 without any progress toward a new contract. The pilots have been negotiating for three-and-a-half years and in federally mediated talks for over six months. The end of scheduled talks may result in the pilots calling a lawful strike should the group be released to seek self-help from the National Mediation Board.

The Weekly Round-Up is updated just about every Sunday. It is where we post all of the stories that appeared on the site in the last week or so for anyone to revisit, comment, etc. This one is for the last 20 days.

This piece was written by James Parks from the AFL-CIO. The orginal is here.

The Whirlpool Corp. makes a big deal of its concern for the environment and the poor. But now, the company is about to throw 1,100 workers at its Evansville, Ind., refrigerator plant onto the streets and move their jobs to Mexico, where labor and environmental laws are weaker.

You can show solidarity with the Whirlpool workers, most of whom are members of IUE-CWA, by signing an online petition urging Whirlpool to reverse its decision and Keep It Made in America: Save Our Jobs. Click here to sign the petition.

An IUPAT member working at the Austin, Texas building -where the plane crashed this week- sprung into action shortly after and ended up saving the lives of five people. The following is a statement of the president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades.

Jake Blumgart is a staff writer for Campus Progress, he asked to post this piece to UR. The original posting is here.

At the beginning of 2009, unions had a reason to feel a little hopeful. The electoral victory spearheaded by Barack Obama the year before seemed to ensure a wave of progressive legislation. The new president even promised to advance the two policies closes to labor’s heart: health care reform and the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), a bill that would make it easier for workers to organize their own workplaces. It turns out expectations were needlessly high, and real labor reforms are going to fail the way they always have.

This blog entry was sent in to UR from Leo Gerard, President of the United Steel Workers. It was co-written by Fred Redmond, USW Vice President for Human Affairs. - R/UR

On Feb. 1, 1960, when four African-American college students sat down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., they ignited a youth-led movement to challenge racial segregation and injustice in the South.

The freshmen refused to stand and eat at the F.W. Woolworth counter as the policy of that time required. They were denied service but remained in their seats. The manager left the students alone hoping they would eventually leave. 

He assumed wrong.

The snow-softened rubble of the Continental General Tire plant at Mayfield, Ky., reminds me of a scene in "New in Town." We rented the movie from a video store the other night.
     
Lucy Hill, played by Renee Zellweger, is a high-powered corporate executive from sunny Miami. She’s been sent in snowy wintertime to a small Minnesota community similar to Mayfield, my hometown, first to downsize, then close, a food processing plant which her company owns.

Plant secretary Blanche Gunderson, played by Siobhan Fallon, accidentally finds a list of workers Hill plans to lay off. She gently confronts Hill.

The Florida sky was lit in a surreal glow early this morning as NASA's space shuttle Endeavor blasted into the sky at 4:14 a.m. TWU Local 525 members were an integral part of sending Endeavour to space and ensuring safe pre and post-launch conditions here on Earth. They represent the ground crew at Kennedy and Cape Canaveral space centers.

The RWDSU's Retail Action Project sponsored a march last evening through the retail district in New York City's trendy SoHo neighborhood, calling for an end to the wage and hour violations that plague the area. The March of Hearts rally featured the testimony of workers who are fighting to recover millions of dollars in back wages from two retail chains in SoHo—Shoe Mania and Mystique.

“For decades the retail sector has been a free-fire zone of worker abuse. With this march we’re putting every merchant on notice that New Yorkers have zero tolerance for employer lawlessness and that retail workers deserve a living wage,” said RWDSU President Stuart Appelbaum.

A new report released today by the Center for Economic and Policy Research examines unionization rates, the size and composition of the unionized workforce, and the wages and benefits for union workers in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.