Vikki Marshall helped to connect unemployed Arizonans with food and shelter during the Reagan-era economic crisis and sometimes found herself on the phone late at night trying to talk a desperate person out of suicide. These experiences as a social worker and union activist in the...
Ryan Andreas helped his union push through legislation for a national infrastructure program two years ago, realizing that historic upgrades to America’s utilities, ports and bridges portended brighter futures for him and his co-workers at Travis Pattern and Foundry. It turned out exactly as Andreas anticipated....
Felipe Venegas wears full-body personal protective equipment—and moves carefully and methodically even on the hottest days—because he processes chemicals with the potential to ignite and explode in a heartbeat. Venegas and his co-workers at Nouryon in La Porte, Texas, put their lives on the line to...
Silica dust at the Genesis Alkali mine in Green River, Wyo., is so thick some days that Marshal Cummings can barely see a foot in front of him. It blankets his clothes, clogs his respirator, coats his hair, blackens his mucus and lodges deep inside him...
She only wanted a few hours at her dying mother’s bedside. But the woman’s bosses at Twin Rivers Paper in Madawaska, Maine, lacked all decency and forced her to the mill on overtime even though it was her day off. About an hour and a half into...
Original Here James Golden knew the crowbar wasn’t the right tool for the job, but it’s what the bosses provided when he needed to perform work on a piece of equipment at the Kumho tire plant in Macon, Ga. The crowbar slipped from Golden’s hand and smacked...
The grief hits Scott Campbell like a ton of bricks every time he walks into the union hall and sees the memorial to the fallen workers. Seven members of the United Steelworkers (USW) union reported for their shifts at the former Tesoro refinery in Anacortes, Wash.,...
Sgt. Jackie E. Garland, twice wounded during combat in Vietnam, returned home only to face even more battles that battered his spirit as well as his body. The ex-Marine and his wife, Helen, struggled for decades to support their six children while fighting for service disability...
The heat index recently soared to 111 degrees in Houston, Texas, but the real-feel temperature climbed even higher than that inside the heavy personal protective equipment (PPE) that John Hayes and his colleagues at Ecoservices wear on the job. Sweat poured from the workers—clad in full-body hazardous materials...
It wasn’t enough for owners of lucrative Southern California car washes to cheat their workers out of wages and overtime. They made workers pay for the towels they used to clean cars, denied them rest breaks, forced them to toil in filthy water that bred foot fungus, and even...