As we pay tribute to the years of service AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker has given to working families, the voting rights and labor movement, we sat down with her, along with Bloomberg BNA Daily Labor Report, to talk about some of her greatest memories and her plans for the future during her retirement.
Watch the tribute video in the post, and check out what Holt Baker had to say.
This Friday, the Los Angeles Black Worker Center (BWC) is holding its first-ever Black Workers Congress to bring workers and the Los Angeles community together to build support and share knowledge to transform the jobs crisis in communities of color.
Outside the Cannon House Office Building this afternoon, immigration activists, including AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker and Communications Workers of America ( CWA ) President Larry Cohen, took arrest for blocking traffic during a sit-in protest.
Leaders of the labor movement are looking at how to create a re-energized movement that’s even more relevant to working people’s lives—and we need your advice. When it comes to making a difference for women today, what’s working and what do we need to change? What are the most important issues for working women? How can we make the biggest impact on those issues? How can we swell the ranks of women leaders—and why does it matter? As we put together recommendations for action at the AFL-CIO Convention in September , we need your voice, your ideas and your perspective on all this and more.
After four decades as a labor activist and more than five years as the executive vice president of the AFL-CIO, Arlene Holt Baker will be retiring from her position in the coming months. Holt Baker announced she was leaving the position she's held since 2007 after the AFL-CIO national convention in September. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, who is up for re-election at the convention, said he would replace Holt Baker on his ticket with Tefere Gebre, who is 45 and is the executive director of the Orange County Labor Federation in California.
AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker and United Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts were among 30 arrested at a rally in West Virginia Tuesday while protesting Patriot Coal's attempts to abandon its commitments to retirees, most of whom worked for Peabody Energy and Arch Coal before those companies created Patriot. Roberts and others say Patriot specifically was created to fail so the original companies could eliminate retiree health care and pension costs.
This morning’s U.S. Supreme Court decision effectively striking down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote is shameful and a major setback to democracy.
Fifty years ago, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and I believe as he did that the “arc of the moral universe… bends toward justice.” But today’s decision twists that bend in the wrong direction.
The Equal Pay Act was landmark legislation. As Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi remarked in a press conference last Thursday:
He [President John F. Kennedy ] knew it was a first step to end the 'unconscionable practice'—in his words—of paying women less than men for the same amount of work. But in the course of 50 years, loopholes in the Equal Pay Act were carved out and exploited. Disparities affecting minority women widened. And the “unconscionable practice” persists.
"The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress.”
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said that in 1965, and African Americans still hear his quote ring.
A new report, Blacks in Unions: 2012 , by the University of California, Berkeley, Center for Labor Research and Education , finds that black workers are 19% more likely to be in unions than non-black workers. In the nation’s 10 largest metropolitan areas, African Americans are 42% more likely than non-blacks to be in unions.
More than 800 union members, their families, immigration advocates and community leaders rallied in front of the Arizona state Capitol yesterday to reaffirm their support for commonsense immigration reform that protects immigrants and America's workers. In a press conference before the rally, Arizona AFL-CIO Executive Director Rebekah Friend announced that the organization had adopted a resolution that calls on Congress to pass immigration reform, including a practical and inclusive road map to citizenship that reflects core American values such as fairness, equality and family unity.
It’s been four years since low-wage workers got a raise. Sign the petition to tell Congress it’s time to raise the minimum wage.
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