Labor

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama won the backing Jan. 9 of the 60,000-strong Culinary Workers Union in Nevada. The endorsement followed announcements by the 450,000-member parent union, Unite Here, and the national Plumbers and Pipefitters Union that they were backing the Illinois senator.

Barack Obama won the backing on Jan. 9 of the 60,000 strong Culinary Workers Union in Nevada, boosting his campaign for the presidency. Nevada voters will caucus on Jan. 19 to select their delegates to the Democratic National Convention. The endorsement followed announcements by the 450,000 member parent union, Unite HERE and the international plumbers’ union that they were backing the Illinois Senator.

WASHINGTON (PAI)--Saying the safety situation in the nation’s skies, especially over Chicago, New York, Atlanta and Southern California, is dire, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association has declared a “controller emergency” in those four areas. And it is taking its campaign for safety in the skies to the public, the airlines and Capitol Hill.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (PAI)--The labor movement will return to Memphis, Tenn., site of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination as he was supporting striking African-American sanitation workers, for its 40th anniversary commemoration of the great civil rights leader’s birth.

WASHINGTON (PAI)--A three-person Presidential Emergency Board, named by GOPer George W. Bush, has proposed a settlement of the eight year dispute between Amtrak and the nine unions representing its 6,000 non-operations workers, leaders of the union coalition said. The settlement would give the workers a contract, a hefty raise and would reject all of the passenger railroad’s work-rule demands.

OAKLAND, California (PAI)-- First, 15 years ago, there was “Hillary Care.” Now there’s “Cheney Care.” But there’s a big difference between the two - and a big difference in the health care they provide.

NORTHFIELD, Minn. (PAI)--Add another unionist to the large ranks of them in the Minnesota legislature. And the election of Democrat Kevin Dahle to a state senate seat from Northfield is special: It shifted the balance of power in state government.

DES MOINES, Iowa – An unprecedented outpouring of independents, youth and women propelled Illinois Sen. Barack Obama to a historic victory in Iowa’s Democratic caucuses Jan. 3 opening the 2008 presidential campaign with a shot surely heard throughout the halls of power in Washington and in America’s corporate boardrooms.

Oregon workers lost one recently when Senate Republicans blocked the extension of federal payments to the timber-dependent counties, including millions of dollars in funding which could have gone to pay for infrastructure and peoples’ needs.