Labor

WEST MILFORD, N.J. — She came from Guatemala and landed a job as a live-in housekeeper for a family here.

Her workday started at 5:30 a.m. and ended at midnight, seven days a week. She cooked, cleaned, watched children, made home repairs and did yard work. At first she earned $150 a month but after a while her employers started paying her no money at all.

Immokalee farmworkers celebrated a landmark agreement late last month, after Burger King agreed to pay them a penny more for every pound of tomatoes they pick, to improve their working conditions and to set up a new code of conduct for growers.

NEW YORK — A crane collapse here May 30, killing two construction workers, brought the total of construction-related deaths in the city since January to 19. There have been 31 deaths of construction workers on the job here in the last seven months, a big increase over previous years.

ST. LOUIS — Barack Obama, in a telephone hook-up May 22, welcomed the 37th annual gathering of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists here by declaring, “We need to reward labor and hard work with a few basic guarantees — health care, education and the right to form a union.”

ATHENS — Migrant workers laboring in the strawberry fields of Nea Manolada, in Greece’s southern Peloponnese region, where 90 percent of the country’s strawberry production is concentrated, waged a historic strike last month that will pave the way for immigrant workers in the country to battle for their rights.

In the last eight months, I have addressed thousands of labor activists and community activists. And while all these audiences have been filled with folks who share my values for social and economic justice, it is this audience that embodies so much of the opportunity I was given to become what I am in this labor movement.

The writer is the wife of an American Axle striker who was on the picket line for three months. I have written tons of letters and blogs the past few months but I have been so overwhelmed with this that I really wasn’t sure of my thoughts.

BIRMINGHAM, Mich. — To wear a lemon costume in public you have to be pretty serious about your cause. So upset was Terry Templeton with the inferior construction of her Pulte-built home that the Arizona resident traveled all the way to Michigan to air her complaints at a shareholders meeting of Pulte Homes Inc.

A group of Indian workers and their supporters in the U.S. labor movement rallied at the U.S. Capitol building May 20 after the workers staged a "water only" strike at the White House that began six days earlier.