Sorry for the quick hit diary, but I didn't see this posted here yet. Over at Century of the Common Iowan, noneed4thneed linked to a blog post by Marc Ambinder yesterday. Although Barack Obama won the United Auto Workers' straw poll of locals in Region 4 (which includes Iowa),

(1) 48% of the voting members of UAW's Region 4 came from Illinois. Barack Obama comes from Illinois.

(2) 22% of the voting members come from Iowa. It turns out that, in today's straw balloting, John Edwards won twice as many Iowa locals as Obama did.

The UAW has a fair number of members in Iowa, many of them in delegate-rich counties for Democrats such as Black Hawk (Waterloo) and Dubuque.

Noneed4thneed adds,

It is looking like the Iowa delegates from the UAW will be split between Edwards and Obama, even if Obama officially wins the endorsement.

You have to remember that Gephardt won the UAW's endorsement in 2004 and that didn't help him much. On the flip side, many think it was the UAW's endorsement that carried Chet Culver to victory in 2006.

I have heard people speculate that the UAW made the difference for Culver in the 2006 gubernatorial primary. Others think it was his successful mobilization of pro-choice women (Planned Parenthood of Greater Iowa's Freedom Fund PAC endorsed Culver and went all out to get him the primary victory).

Anyway, I obviously would rather have Edwards getting the UAW endorsement than Obama. But it is heartening for me to know that Edwards would have won the straw poll if only locals in Iowa had been voting.

Despite a brief hiatus last week, my impromptu labor links roundup appears to be picking up steam!  There are a bunch of interesting things to read this week, so be sure to check them out:

• Another key court case is coming down the pike: New York New York Hotel, LLC.  The key issue in the case boils down to who is an "employee" under the definition of the National Labor Relations Act.  Prof. Ellen Dannin, whose writing I linked to in the last round-up, wrote about this case at Working Life and filed an amicus brief arguing that NLRA defines employee as "any employee", not just the employee of the workplace being organized.  This is a key point: the framers of NLRA explicitly intended for the act to create solidarity across workplaces, not just within a workplace, and defined "employee" expansively in order to allow employees of one workplace to help organize employees of another.  From a legal perspective, this case is very interesting, because it highlights just how broadly NLRA overthrows basic common law concepts like "employee".  From an organizing perspective, this case is incredibly important, because it could, expand the rights to organize considerably, or limit them.  Check out Prof. Dannin's post, and an excerpt from her amicus brief, here.

• Global Labor Strategies posted a comprehensive critique of the UAW-GM deal, which argues that UAW missed an opportunity to "strategically retreat", thereby sowing seeds for later victories, in this case.  The post also includes some interesting labor history.  With the GM deal apparently approved and the Chrysler deal perhaps moving in the same direction, the VEBA-style agreements appear to have considerable momentum.  Nevertheless, anyone interested in making sense of the deal, and possibly getting a glimpse of the Ford contract, should certainly check out this analysis.

• A new site, We Are Labor, which aggregates labor news on the blogosphere has just launched.  Similar in some ways to the LabourStart US, We Are Labor focuses less on news accounts, and more on aggregating blog posts from a variety of sources - union blogs, progressive blogs, etc.  The site is heavy on RSS and aggregation, so fire up your blogreader and check it out!

• In news which is a bit old by now, the labor endorsements have been mildly disappointing to the Edwards campaign.  Edwards, whose chosen base constituency could be described as "labor plus netroots", has picked up some key endorsements (notably Carpenters, USW and UAW, as well as a raft of state SEIU councils).  But Clinton and Obama have combined to deny him some very big endorsements, notably the national SEIU endorsement, and rack up a couple of their own - most recently and notably, Clinton's endorsement from the AFT.  Although I generally try to keep tabs on what's up in the world of labor and am very interested in organizing and strategies for building the strength and reach of the labor movement, I don't really follow the union endorsement stories.  I'm also firmly undecided in terms of who I support for president (although major bonus points to anyone who can guess how I voted on the DFA endorsement ballot - and you have to get my first, second and third choices right.)  Still, I think Edwards has really gotten a raw deal overall.  Edwards is probably the most outspoken pro-labor presidential candidate we've seen in years, and will see for quite a long time.  My very simplistic take on the endorsements race is: if Edwards can't win broad support from labor, who on earth can?  How would Eugene Debs do in today's upside-down world of interest group politics?  Just a bit of a rant, not a real endorsement.  Still, let the presidential flame wars begin!

If you've got other labor-related tidbits to share, or if you want to try and guess how I voted in the DFA endorsement, chime in using the comments!

Cross Posted at Daily Kos

For the second time in several weeks, United Auto Workers are on strike.  This time, it's the workers at Chrysler plants across the country.  49,000 UAW workers went on strike at 11:00 am EST time today against their employers to fight for their rights and a better contract.  Even though Chrysler expects the strike to only last for a short while, we need to stand with our brothers and sisters in labor during this potentially difficult time.  Follow me over the fold to find out more.

Last week's labor news roundup went pretty well, so I thought I'd follow up with a slight twist this week.  The labor-o-sphere has been lighting up this week, partially due to an odious NLRB ruling.  Here are a few interesting tidbits I found.  Check them out, and add any interesting essays you might have found in the comments:

• Prof. Ellen Dannin, Professor of Law at Pennsylvania State University, posted a long and thought-provoking piece about unions and their stance towards the Wagner Act (which, together with the Taft-Hartley Act, forms the bulwark of US law related to labor organizing) and the NLRB, titled Unasked Questions and Unasked for Answers on the State of Labor Today.  The post encourages labor leaders and union activists to challenge privatization and globalization.  Drawing on her 2005 book Taking back the worker's law, Dannin also argues for a concerted litigational effort to roll back two key anti-union interpretations of labor law - striker replacement and the employer's right to impose terms if an impasse occurs during contract negotiations (called implementation-upon-impasse).  This is a fascinating post and highly recommended.  Anyone who's interested in follow-up reading should check out Taking back the worker's law.

• Also at Workling Life, Jonathan Tasini posted about NLRB's recent decision to entertain a union-decertification petition filed shortly after the original union certification law.  This decision overthrows NLRB's longstanding precedent to allow a union certification election result to stand for a reasonable amount of time, in order to allow a union a chance to succeed in its collective bargaining efforts.  The decision, which is hard to square with the Wagner Act's unequivocal demand that the government favor collective bargaaining arrangements, could potentially make union busting even easier, and unionization yet more difficult.

• An alert reader pointed me to CWA Votes, a website which allows members of Communications Workers of America to sound off on the presidential election and, presumably, sway the union's endorsement decision.  This reminds me of SEIU's decision to allow the membership to vote on the 2004 endorsement take a straw poll of some of its activists in order to gather input on the 2004 endorsement (resulting in the surprising Dean endorsement), and I think it's a great step. (For more on the SEIU process and general info on unions soliciting members' opinions in endorsement decisions, see this comment by user Skipster.)

• A few tidbits of high-profile union news: UAW will negotiate its next contract with Chrysler.  I can't really say whether this is a good decision or not, but it seems to me that it might be interesting to gather opinions on this decision through some kind of web-based crowdsourcing system, like an electronic market or broad-based voting system.  Such an experiment might yield some very interesting collective wisdom (or, it could get spiked by paid company shills; hard to say.)  In other news and UNITE-HERE Tama workers have voted to end a 15-week strike and authorized a 3-year contract.
  

Any other tidbits?  Drop 'em in the comments!

There's been a lot going on in labor news lately.  The UAW strike was the big story, but there's more: another state joined the ranks of card-check states (where public employees may organize through card-check campaigns); Change to Win had its second annual convention; and the Teamsters suffered a setback in their School Bus Workers United campaign.  Follow me across the flip for more...

It's must see TV for the nurses and patients, as they vlog their famous invasion of the Capitol last week to kickoff the campaign against a bad healthcare deal concocted in California by an unholy alliance of Governor Arnold, the legislature and the big insurance corporations.  The movement for guaranteed healthcare and nurse power is heating up around the country...take a look!

...cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association's Breakroom Blog, as we organize to make 2007 the Year of GUARANTEED healthcare on the single-payer model.

The John Edwards campaign announced tonight that John will join striking UAW workers in Buffalo tomorrow.  He will join the members of U.A.W. Local 774 in their picket of GM's Powertrain plant.

Workers are being asked to pay for bad products with their pensions and their healthcare.  Nothing crystallizes the need for John Edwards's universal health care plan more than this strike.

The UAW's strike against GM is not just about their members' healthcare...but also about the healthcare of millions of people not represented by a powerful union.  We'll look at the potential impact of this historic strike and what it means for workers and the nation that is healthcare increasingly becoming the central issue for labor, both in bargaining and activism...

...cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association's Breakroom Blog, as we organize to make 2007 the Year of GUARANTEED healthcare on the single-payer model.