For the third consecutive day, hundreds of independent truckers protested Wednesday at the Port of Oakland. The truckers’ main demand is the repeal of provisions in California State Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), which would eliminate much of the independent trucking industry on the docks. Hundreds of truckers blocked the entrances to the docks with their trucks, bringing operations to a standstill.
Ukraine’s Parliament has passed two bills that obliterate workers’ rights to collective bargaining and other fundamental labour protections, and allow employers to put up to 10% of their workforce on “zero hour” contracts leaving them without any control over their working lives.
If signed by President Volodimir Zelenskyy, the bills will become law. The ITUC Ukraine affiliates FPU and KVPU have condemned the moves.
In the wake of a higher-than-anticipated inflation reading, experts implored the Federal Reserve not to pursue more "aggressive interest rate hikes."
Hotter-than-expected inflation data published Wednesday intensified fears among progressive economists that the Federal Reserve—in its single-minded drive to tame price increases—will needlessly lock in another major interest rate hike at its policy meeting later this month, further suppressing economic demand and moving the country closer to a recession.
Spreading knowledge and awareness of the climate crisis isn’t enough. There’s no hope for the planet without climate policies that address the material interests of workers.
If today’s unionization rate in the US was the same as it was forty years ago (already a low bar, as that number is significantly down from the mid-1950s peak), the number of union members would be well over 30 million instead of about 17 million. In fact, though the workforce has increased by some 56 million since the early 1980s, the number of union members has fallen by over 3 million.
Dispatch from the largest event in the organization’s 43-year history
“The white collar crime syndicate known as Corporate America is hereby put on notice that the working people of America have had enough!”
—Sean O’ Brien, Labor Notes 2022
“Fuck Jeff Bezos!”
—Christian Smalls, Labor Notes 2022
Dennis Gruending is an Ottawa-based author and a former member of Parliament from Saskatchewan.
The organized medical profession of the day was opposed to medicare and threatened to strike. People who supported the plan began to organize citizen-led community clinics and recruit sympathetic doctors to staff them.
New disclosures reveal RCMP surveillance of meetings on government-funded clinics at the dawn of medicare in the early 1960s, Dennis Gruending writes.
![Truckers gather to protest AB 5 at Port of Los Angeles, July 14, 2022 [Photo by Cindy Perez]](https://ecosocialistsvancouver.org/sites/default/files/styles/medium/public/article-image/ef25fa2ccdc4a68f87604bafa0625bb144f89bca.jpg?itok=rKUR-ru_)
