Last December, working people around the world celebrated the victory of the Republic Window and Door Factory workers, members of United Electrical workers, who occupied their factory for six days and won their struggle to hold Bank of America accountable to pay them the money they were owed at the closing of their factory.  Today on Labor Radio we hear about two more factory worker struggles out of Illinois, the Hartmarx suit factory workers in Chicago, members of Workers United, and the Quad City Die Casting factory workers, members of United Electrical Workers.  In both of the struggles this spring, the opponent is not Bank of America but its class comrade Wells Fargo.  Are banks the new bosses?  And why all this militancy out of Illinois?  

You’ve heard of the cowboy poets and the lumberjacks, but why has history almost hushed up the tale of the tramp printers, who hopped trains and drank and set type and ran presses, and who by the mid-1800s had built a militant union with equal pay for women and a worker-run hiring system?  Labor Radio spoke with Charles Overbeck, co-founder of Portland’s Eberhardt Press, and author of a new essay on the history of tramp printers.  Read more in his article Knights of the Road in the latest issue of Steampunk Magazine.

As layoffs and downsizing continue at many newspapers, more people turn to the Internet to get their news. What is the future of the labor movement in the online news industry, where many journalists work from home and have never met their co-workers in person?  On August 27^th, progressive news source Truthout.org made history as the first online-only news site to form a union.