Longtime labor leader Clyde Fitzgerald, president of the South Atlantic & Gulf Coast District of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA), has been appointed to serve on the Port Commission of the Port of Houston Authority.  Fitzgerald has worked on the Houston waterfront for 50 years and has been president of ILA Local 28 for two decades.  He is also a vice president in the International ILA.

The more than 14,000 waterfront workers at 15 East and Gulf Coast ports have ratified a new six-year master agreement between the Longshoremen (ILA) and the port employer group the United States Maritime Alliance.

The Longshoremen (ILA) and the United States Maritime Alliance have reached a tentative agreement covering some 14,000 workers in 15 East Coast ports, the Federal Mediation Service and Conciliation (FMCS) announced late Friday. The two sides had faced a Feb. 6 strike deadline.

A temporary deal has been reached between the Longshoremen (ILA) and the United States Maritime Alliance (USMA) that will delay for 30 days a strike that was scheduled to start Sunday. The strike would have shut down East Coast ports from Boston to Miami, with 14,000 workers taking part. A strike will start at midnight Jan. 28 if a deal isn't reached by then.

Brenda Loya in AFL-CIO Media Affairs sends us this from Alabama, where she will report on the delegation of African American labor and civil rights leaders as they investigate Alabama’s recently passed anti-immigrant law. Follow the delegation here.

With the passage of H.B. 56, Alabama has taken a huge step backward, into the 1950s. Today, an African American delegation of labor and civil rights leaders traveled to Birmingham, Ala., to help shed a light on what is seen as one of the harshest immigration laws in the country and how it invokes inhumanity reminiscent of the Jim Crow South.

Delegates to the Longshoremen’s (ILA‘s) quadrennial convention last week in Hollywood, Fla., elected Harold Daggett as president of the union. Daggett succeeds Richard Hughes, who did not seek re-election.