OB Rag

By Peter Cole- Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 29, 2008 On Thursday, May Day, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union will declare…

SAN FRANCISCO, CA. Hundreds of Bay Area dockworkers plan to march this morning after their stop-work meeting. The union members…

BREAKING NEWS: Members of the Port Workers Union of Iraq plan to shutdown the ports of Umm Qasr and Khor…

“There is no one here, the streets are dead,” says Oakland, CA trucker OAKLAND, CA. An initial ABC KGO NEWS…

Beginning May 1, and continuing for the rest of that week, the Department of Homeland Security is planning to undertake…

May Day was officially founded in 1886, during a Chicago strike for the eight-hour workday. In 1889, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) delegate to the International Labor Congress in Paris proposed May 1 as international Labor Day. Workers were to march for an eight-hour day, democracy and the right of workers to organize. Delegates approved the request and chose May 1, 1890, as a day of demonstrations in favor of the eight-hour day.

On a separate track, U.S. labor leaders had agitated for creation of a labor holiday years before the Chicago rally. Among them, Peter J. McGuire, a carpenter and labor union leader, had proposed his idea for a holiday honoring America’s workers at a New York labor meeting in early 1882. (Others say the “founder” of Labor Day was Matthew Maguire, a machinist who served as secretary of the Central Labor Union in New York.)”

History of May Day Bound Up In the 8-Hour Work Day Movement and the Martyrs of the “Haymarket Massacre”

The story of the Haymarket Martyrs, and their monument in Forest Home Cemetery, begins at a convention of the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions in 1884. The Federation (the predecessor to the American Federation of Labor) called for a great movement to win the 8-hour workday, which would climax on May 1, 1886.

Book Review of Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire by Alex Abella By…

I just finished watching a CNN video (April 28, 2008) [see below] on the slave labor conditions of immigrants working…

An email intercepted by CBS News shows that the VA’s head of Mental Health has knowingly lied to the public,…

Today Reuters reported that due to the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the dramatic rise in foreclosures of owner-occupied housing, America…

It has often been said that “truth is the first casualty of war.” But there is another immediate casualty -compassion….

By Ann Scott Tyson / Washington Post Staff Writer / Saturday, April 26, 2008 The nation’s top military officer said…