By Jessica Peralta

Community Sentinel

IRVINE, CA — UCI MIND’s laboratory has 15 freezers and five refrigerators. They are packed — but not with food. 

About 1,200 brains are currently stored in those freezers and fridges.

Each sample represents a person who donated their brain to science with the hopes of helping future generations overcome neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s disease

By Steve Wishnia

Eight unions representing federal employees filed a lawsuit Aug. 24 challenging two rules recently imposed by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), arguing that they would effectively eliminate the protections civil-service laws give workers against being fired without just cause.

By Steve Wishnia

As artificial intelligence expands its share of recorded music, musicians need to establish their rights to “consent, compensation, and credit” when their work is used, an American Federation of Musicians spokesperson recently told Work-Bites.

By Steve Wishnia

Trying to protect federal workers’ rights under Donald Trump’s rule has been a one-battle-after-another scenario—and this month, it’s happening on three fronts.

By Joe Maniscalco

There’s an early passage in Matewan Blood & Coal, Kevin Corley’s riveting novelization of the 1920 West Virginia coal miner’s strike and Battle of Blair Mountain where he writes about how “The moon cast long shadows over Matewan’s emptied streets: gunpowder lingered in the air, faint but unmistakable, like history refusing to leave quietly.”

Can you see it?

By Steve Wishnia

The Supreme Court ruled June 29 that it was an unconstitutional limitation on the President’s powers for Congress to establish independent agencies whose officials can’t be fired without cause, such as the Federal Trade Commission and the National Labor Relations Board.

By Eilean Faltin

In Santiago, Chile, International Labor Day is celebrated with two parades. One procession is organized by CUT—the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores de Chile, which functions as the main negotiating body between workers and the government. This parade is protected by police barricades and runs more or less orderly down La Alameda—the main avenue of the city.

By Joe Maniscalco

It’s just after 9 p.m. in the fall of 1992 and union organizer Phil Cohen is inside a dingy cement-block building in Cornelius, North Carolina wondering if he’s quick enough to pull the .38 special in his shoulder holster before the two irate Klansmen in front of him start shooting.

War Stories By Phil Cohen

Editor’s Note: Editor’s Note: Several years ago, Phil Cohen authored an indispensable training manual in labor law for rank and file workers called “Enforcing Your Rights.” Work-Bites has been happy to bring you the serialization of that book with this concluding chapter on Just Cause.

If you ask most workers about the most important part of a union contract, they’ll usually say money or seniority. But both answers are wrong. The most important part of a union contract lies in two simple words: Just Cause.  Sometimes buried within the most unlikely contract article, you’ll find, “the company can discipline or fire employees for just cause.”

By Steve Wishnia

“I’ve witnessed many people having heatstroke, and many people having limbs and fingers amputated,” a worker at a Consolidated Catfish processing plant in Mississippi told reporters Apr. 22, speaking anonymously out of fear of retaliation. Despite the heat from the machines and the Deep South weather, she added, the plant has only one or two functioning water fountains, and they’re both “unsanitary.”

Editor’s Note:Several years ago, Phil Cohen authored an indispensable training manual in labor law for rank and file workers called “Enforcing Your Rights.” Work-Bites is happy to bring you the continuing serialization of that book with this latest chapter on the National Labor Relations Board.

War Stories By Phil Cohen

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is a federal law enforcement agency - created in 1935 to protect the rights of workers to form unions and engage in collective bargaining.  Those rights are spelled out in the National Labor Relations Act.  

By Joe Maniscalco

Organizers of the latest round of “No Kings” demonstrations held nationwide over the weekend concluded their post-game wrap-up on Tuesday evening promising, “tonight is the night when we move from talking about what’s next—to doing what’s next.”

War Stories By Phil Cohen

Editor’s Note: Several years ago, Phil Cohen authored an indispensable training manual in labor law for rank and file workers called “Enforcing Your Rights.” Work-Bites is happy to bring you the continuing serialization of that book with this latest chapter on worker’s comp.

Every company I’ve dealt with is crooked when it comes to worker’s comp, and deliberately confuses employees about their rights.

By Steven Wishnia

Bruce Springsteen’s “The Streets of Minneapolis” is the best protest song of the 21st century.

It’s an instant song, born in a burst of outrage, much like Florence Reese scribbled the words to “Which Side Are You On?” on the back of a calendar 95 years ago, after Harlan County Sheriff J.H. Blair’s goons broke into her house looking for her husband during a coal miners’ strike in the Kentucky Appalachians.

Editor’s Note: Several years ago, Phil Cohen authored an indispensable training manual in labor law for rank and file workers called “Enforcing Your Rights.” Work-Bites is happy to bring you the serialization of that book beginning with this opening chapter on FMLA. 

The biggest secrets in America are the laws that protect working people.  They don’t teach this in school and you’re certainly not going to learn about them from an employer. The ONLY way workers get educated about their rights is if they have a union. And knowing your rights is only half the challenge.  You then have to learn how to enforce them.

By Steve Wishnia

I wrote this article for the Alternet website in 2008. I’d known and been proud of my grandparents being immigrants since I was a kid, but I’d only recently learned about how my grandfathers arrived here. It was also the first in-depth piece I’d done on labor issues, which was the logical way to connect their stories to the present.

By Eilean Faltin

Federal forces are marauding across American cities, widely despised billionaires are flagrantly committing omnicide, and 60-70 million full-time U.S. employees do not make a living wage.

For many younger people, the necessity and the urgency of mass revolutionary action could not be any clearer. Yet, U.S. union membership remains at an all-time low of 9.9%, raising the questions of whether or not a wider general strike like the one seen in Minneapolis last week can be organized without militant labor leadership.

War Stories By Phil Cohen

One of the labor movement’s most essential obligations is enforcing health and safety regulations. Factories, warehouses and other industrial facilities are inherently dangerous environments, compounded by management deliberately ignoring serious hazards to avoid repair costs. Ironically this is one of the least important issues for many workers who trust in their luck, focusing instead on wages, benefits and plant rules.

Work-Bites

After months of destroying civilian boats off the coast of Venezuela, killing scores of civilians which the Trump administration claimed were involved in the illicit drug trade, the US military staged a violent incursion into that country and abducted President Nicholas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores.

By Bill Barry

Editor’s Note: This column is reposed here with permission of the author.

At a high point of membership in 1957, 37% of the U.S. workforce was in a union. More importantly, for non-union workers, about 40% of them enjoyed union conditions thanks to what analysts call “the spillover effect.” As unions raised workplace standards, employers had to keep up. While there were cultural conflicts about breadwinners and breadmakers, many households had one-income families with  good wages, fully paid health insurance, defined benefit pensions, and a secure future.