Let's pause for a moment this Labor Day to recognize some of our most important, yet most maligned workers. They're teachers and librarians, police officers and firefighters. They're bus drivers, doctors and nurses. Judges and…
Posts published by “Dick Meister”
It was an unusually hot July day in San Francisco. There was a parade on that day in 1916 — a “Preparedness Day” parade organized by local Republican businessmen. It was intended to drum up…
The Fourth of July, as we all know, is Independence Day. Hurray for George Washington and the revolutionaries, down with King George and the British. That sort of thing. But have you ever wondered what…
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other outspoken foes of organized labor like to claim that small business owners are as anti-union as the notoriously anti-union Chamber and its big business members. But don't you…
Never has there been a greater champion of US workers than former Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz, who died on April 24 at 98. Certainly in more than a half-century of covering labor, I’ve never…
Like most daily newspapers these days, the San Francisco Chronicle is hustling to increase declining profit margins. But let me offer some advice to my former employer: Quit gouging grieving readers as part of your…
Of all the ideas out there on how to pull us out of the economic mess we’re in, none makes more sense than the program laid out by the AFL-CIO and a coalition of civil…