In letters to President Obama, more than 500 small business owners serving the Avondale (La.) Shipyard community compared Northrop Grumman’s plans to shut down the Avondale  shipyard to “pirates in earlier era who scuttled ships to keep their foes from using them.” The giant shipyard is closing to maximize corporate profits, not because it is losing money.

Boeing Co. Executive Vice President and General Counsel Michael Luttig pulled in $3.7 million in compensation in 2009. That’s a whopping 34 percent increase from 2008—and it came during a major recession.

Meanwhile, as Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) pointed out during a hearing yesterday (see video) on the shrinking American middle class, Boeing’s workers have seen just a 3 percent increase in their average compensation over the past 20 years!

Ben Horowitz from Painter and Allied Trades (IUPAT) District Council 15, sends us this report.

In Romulus, Mich., seven community members linked arms and refused to leave the street outside the Detroit Airport Marriott, blocking a bus they believed was carrying PulteGroup’s board of directors. Minutes later, while the Romulus 7 were taken away in handcuffs, the PulteGroup board sat inside, still not held accountable for the $880M tax refund they ostensibly received for job creation.

Even as millions of U.S. workers can’t find a job and corporate profits are through the roof, House Speaker John Boehner has proposed a change in the tax system that will shrink the job pool even more. Boehner’s suggestion to exempt U.S corporations from paying taxes on offshore profits would give companies even more incentive to move jobs overseas, according to a new report.

For years, billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch flew under the radar as they financed right-wing campaigns and extreme conservative think tanks to overturn financial regulations, corporate rules, environmental standards, workers’ rights and the entire litany of “evils” on the radical right agenda.

Last year, when Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, it was a “historic milestone on our path toward a more just society,” says AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker, “But we also know that much work is left to be done.”

More than 200 students, teachers and other activists—many from Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—rallied today in Washington, D.C., against  Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) and Gov. Tom Corbett’s moves to privatize their states’ schools.

Gary Beevers, United Steelworkers (USW) international vice president for Oil Bargaining, sends us this report. Beevers has extensive experience negotiating with major oil companies with the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers Union (OCAW).

A little after midnight on Good Friday last year, a heat exchanger on a naphtha hydrotreater unit at the Tesoro oil refinery in Anacortes, Wash., catastrophically failed.  The unit exploded, setting off a blast that shook homes five miles away and igniting a fire that could be seen anywhere in Anacortes.  Three oil workers died in the blast; four others died at the hospital from injuries sustained in the accident.

The day after federal mine safety officials announced a series of “outrageous” safety violations at a Massey Energy West Virginia coal mine, mining industry officials were on Capitol Hill calling for fewer federal inspections and a voluntary safety program.

In a major win for the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) and a stern rebuke to league owners, U.S. District Judge Susan Richard Nelson told owners to lift the lockout they imposed on players March 12.