CHICAGO CARLESS

Thinking about a good use of time Monday morning? Why not check out what the Democratic presidential candidates are saying to the Laborers’ union? That’s what I’ll be doing…

Monday morning from 8:20 to 11:00 a.m. Central (give or take) at the Chicago Seraton Hotel & Towers in Streeterville, the half-million-member Laborers’ International Union of North America (LiUNA) is hosting the first live webcast of White House hopefuls broadcast directly to union members. Scheduled to speak: Joe Biden; Hillary Clinton; John Edwards; Bill Richardson; and Barack Obama…or not (recent event materials suggest our very own Senator may have bailed from the webcast).

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(Photo: Some people rest their lives upon the silliest of foundations.)

[This entry is one in a series of dispatches from my recent trips to Gotham.]

You never know the characters you’ll run into in a Rego Park laundry room. Doing my mid-trip laundry with Jen of the mountainous bosoms (Babs’ girlfriend of 20 years–and I was there the day they first held hands), I had already rediscovered one of the less happy denizens of Queens Boulevard apartment building basements. Back in Chicago, I never saw any insect as big as an NYC water bug. True to form, it just wouldn’t die, no matter how many times I whacked it with an industrial dustpan. It eventually took several strikes from a broom handle to stop its four-inch, double-antennaed form from wriggling. Wriggling enough to walk, anyway.

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(Photo: Peering into obscurity, where does one circle end and the other begin? You tell me.)

A couple of days ago, the right-wing wonks at the inaptly monickered “Center for Union Facts”, an arch-conservative national front group fighting tooth and nail to put down America’s workers and remove any and all union protections that enable America’s middle class to organize for a better life, took me to task for supporting the Employee Free Choice Act. Me, a modest, little Chicago blogger. When the national opposition sees fit to criticize the little guy on the merits of the argument (and I’m not the only little guy to get the treatment by far, for one, read Prison Ship’s post on the same topic), that’s pretty stunning evidence that the argument holds water in my book.

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Update, May 29, 2007:

A big shout out to our friends over at the so-called “Center for Union Facts” for being irked enough about my calling them out on the falsehoods about the Employee Free Choice Act that they choose to disseminate–they’re a right-wing front group masquerading as a workers’ rights organization, you know that, right?–that they linked to this post on Chicago Carless. I say. You can’t pay for coverage like that! Thanks, guys!

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(May 28, 2007) Now that I’m back to labor blogging, some of you may be wondering why I care so much of late about the Employee Free Choice Act. It’s not that I march in lockstep with my fellow Progressives across the country. I’ve seen many friends and colleagues get treated unfairly when it comes to labor-management issues and in the line of work I’m in, I’ve heard far too many horror stories. I happen to think it’s a damned good piece of legislation and the country’s best hope of saving our dying middle class. Here’s why…

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Back in February, I scribed about the Employee Free Choice Act (H.R. 800, S. 1041), a bill aimed at making it easier for American workers to come together to form unions. Among other things, the Employee Free Choice Act would:

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(Photo: Kaiser Permanente likes its unions, it really likes them…)

We now return you to our regularly scheduled Carless. Breakup or not, I remain a staunch Progressive. Frequently, my friends and colleagues in D.C. turn me on to stories that they think I’ll find socially important. This one was enough to help break me out of a momentary funk.

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(Photo: It’s not just a barista thing; you will understand. Credit: Starbucks Union.)

Today, a momentary hop back onto the labor movement bandwagon to talk about the Employee Free Choice Act, and why you should care about it.

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