First up on this week’s labor blog roundup:  Becks’ is right to ask why, on Black Friday, we need to make retail workers get up before 4 AM?  No wonder H&M workers have decided to join UFCW. 

The Broadway stagehands have ended their strike. And the writers are staying strong.  So are most late night talk show hosts. David Letterman’s paying his writers through the end of the year, and Jay Leno has been on the picket line for the writers.  It turns out that Leno would cancel a personal appearance rather than be associated with the union busters at Jackson Lewis. (Do we know anyone who may lack this character? hmmm). The rest of these shows have stopped production, with one exception. Not only is Carson Daly a rat, he’s suborning his family to scab. Friend of the blog Elana Levin has some links to the best WGA videos for you to check out as well.

Nurses in Kansas City bucked a management “no” campaign to vote to join AFT’s Nurses United, and we’ve got more on charter school organizing in New York here.  In other news dealers at Foxwoods have voted to go union. And, for my friends in the building trades, there’s a better chance that charter schools in New York will at least be built at union wage rates.

Also, a couple of people asked me about my post with the giant inflatable rat. For the uninitiated, it’s a traditional prop used to demonstrate at non-union construction worksites (think “rat contractors”).  It also has a cult following.  The Late Show Writers' Blog has more. 

I want to leave you with a final thought from an op-ed in the Detroit News by David Hecker, president of AFT-Michigan: 

We hear it all the time: Organized labor is just a "special interest. They only care about themselves." Why single out unions in a negative way as a special interest?

It is an attempt to turn the union into a "third party," to undercut support. The intent is to make people think the union is something other than its members, and that the union looks out for "itself" and nothing else.

The truth, of course, is that a union is its members, and the members are the community.

Have a good weekend everyone