Patricia McDonald layered on sweaters, socks and mittens and huddled under blankets for 15 hours as the temperature in her Duncanville, Texas, home plunged to 42 degrees last week. Well after the water in her kitchen froze, McDonald decided she’d had enough and braved a hair-raising...
Dave Dell Isola, the son and grandson of union members, grew up grateful for the family-sustaining wages and benefits that organized labor won for working people. But he never fully grasped the might of solidarity until he and his wife, Barbara, and their two sons lost...
When workers at Orchid Orthopedic Solutions tried to form a union, the company quickly brought in five full-time union-busters to torment them day and night. The hired guns saturated the Bridgeport, Mich., plant with anti-union messages, publicly belittled organizers, harangued workers on the shop floor and...
Time and again over the past few years, as he fought to protect his co-workers at Bobcat’s North Dakota plant, William Wilkinson faced two obstacles. One was the company. The other was a federal government that, instead of fulfilling its duty to safeguard workers, helped management...
When COVID-19 forced the 66-bed Maryhill Manor into lockdown, a resolute Veronica Dixon and her colleagues realized they had to make a choice: band together or fall apart. So they put in longer hours, shouldered extra duties and leaned on each other to keep the Niagara,...
For months, Penny Burroughs kept a close eye on working conditions at PCI Pharma Services and worried about her colleagues contracting COVID-19. Burroughs and other representatives of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 286 collaborated with the pharmaceutical packaging company on intensive safety plans—even on-site medical care and...
Vermeshia Slay burns up the phone lines these days, encouraging Georgia voters to join the burgeoning grassroots movement to transform America’s future. After delivering a crucial victory for Joe Biden in November, Slay and millions of other change-hungry Georgia voters set their sights on something even bigger. They want to help...
Brian Banks and his colleagues at Nipro Glass log 60- or 70-hour weeks right now in a grueling race to produce the glass tubing and vials essential to distributing millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccine. Banks, a maintenance mechanic for nearly three decades, often feared over...
Chad Longpre Shepersky repeatedly took COVID-19 tests—and waited on pins and needles for results each time—during a coronavirus outbreak at Guardian Angels Health & Rehabilitation Center in Hibbing, Minn. Longpre Shepersky, a certified nursing assistant (CNA), never contracted the virus. But he watched in agony as...
Tim O’Daniel and his co-workers at Cleveland Clinic Akron General confront additional cases of COVID-19 every day in a hospital so busy it’s sometimes difficult to find an empty bed. They’re also battling rising frustration after waiting months for comprehensive coronavirus testing and other federal resources...