All but one of the 22 workers at Brooklyn Cablevision, who the Communications Workers of America (CWA) says were illegally fired in January, are now back on the job, according to Erin Mahoney, organizing coordinator for CWA District 1.

Through emails, Facebook likes, petitions, rallies and other means, more than 100,000 people showed their support for the workers who have been attempting to negotiate a contract with Cablevision for more than a year. The workers vow they will continue to demand a fair contract.   

City leaders in Camden, N.J., who plan to fire all 273 police officers on the city’s force in favor of low-paid, nonunion mercenaries, should “learn a lesson from the NFL referee debacle,” says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka:

Though replacement refs threatened a game we love, a replacement police force threatens lives and puts our families and communities at risk. The decision by Camden city leaders is irresponsible and unacceptable and should be rescinded immediately.

Unfathomable that Camden city leaders plan to fire entire police force & use replacements - have they not learned the lesson from the NFL?

— Richard L. Trumka (@RichardTrumka) October 3, 2012

Darren Shiroma, executive assistant to the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, sends us this.

Last year, a small and brave group of flight attendants approached the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA with a goal to become union members with rights to collective bargaining with their employer. Today, they are being attacked by a textbook anti-union campaign run by a management that boasts positive labor relations with the 1,100 unionized Aer Lingus Cabin Crew in Ireland. Management honors the contract in Ireland and works collaboratively with IMPACT, the union representing 65,000 transport workers, while imposing lesser pay, benefits, work rules and an oppressive work environment for the 53 American-based Aer Lingus Flight Attendants.

Sarah Seltzer writes for Alternet and other online publications and sends us this.

When a group of longtime food service employees of Pomona College in California—a prominent liberal arts school—lost their jobs due to their immigration status, it got an already tense campus talking. This wasn’t an ordinary firing, or even an unfortunate casualty of the nasty wave of anti-immigration sentiment. To people on campus who had been helping the workers speak up for their rights, it felt like union-busting. The terminated workers had been employed on campus for years, but only after they began a drive toward unionization with UNITEHERE! was their immigration status investigated by the college.

Donna Gratehouse, who blogs at DemocraticDiva and elsewhere on all things Arizona, sends us this.

Arizona’s teachers and first responders are under full-frontal attack this week, as union-stripping bills that have been called “Wisconsin on steroids” are being shuttled through the legislative process at whirlwind speed. These bills would prohibit public-sector unions from negotiating pay and benefits, ban paycheck deductions for union dues and ban compensation for union activities. They passed through committee hearings last week and are going to be debated in the full Senate this week. It’s expected that they will pass through both chambers easily due to the anti-labor GOP majority in both. It’s unclear if Gov. Jan Brewer will sign them into law. A Phoenix-based right-wing pressure group, the Goldwater Institute, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) are behind the measures.

This is a cross-post by Dustin Beilke from PR Watch.

Today, hundreds of state legislators from across the nation will head out to an island resort off the coast of Florida to a unique “education academy” sponsored by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). There will be no students or teachers. Instead, legislators, representatives from right-wing think tanks and for-profit education corporations will meet behind closed doors to channel their inner Milton Friedman and promote the radical transformation of the American education system into a private, for-profit enterprise.

Jim Morin was a former Air Force air traffic controller when he joined the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 1977 and was assigned to one of the busiest airports in the nation, New York’s LaGuardia, where he became secretary-treasurer of the PATCO local.

Teresa Casertano in the AFL-CIO Organizing Department’s Global Campaigns section sends us this report.

T-Mobile USA workers were not surprised to learn that a recent report by the Trade Union Advisory Committee (TUAC) to the OECD revealed that T-Mobile owner, Deutsche Telekom, had failed to meet its own claims about corporate social responsibility.  Under the corporate social responsibility reporting standards set by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), Deutsche Telekom gives itself an A+ rating, yet it provides little evidence to justify granting itself such superior marks.

Impressive editorial in today’s New York Times on Tuesday’s recall elections in Wisconsin. Here’s an excerpt, but you really need to read the full piece here.

[Gov. Scott] Walker and his colleagues tried to paint the unions as unwilling to sacrifice a bit of their pensions and health benefits in rough fiscal times. It was heartening to see more than 160,000 Wisconsin voters reject that false notion. The unions had already agreed to significant concessions on both; what the Republicans really wanted was to break their organizing ability by ending bargaining on anything except wages and limiting raises to inflation.