Auto workers are bracing for a bumpy road ahead at Chrysler. . . .

Dues are the bricks and mortar of our labor movement, but in many unions dues are a taboo subject. From per capita taxes to initiation fees and special assessments, rank-and-file members rarely get a full picture of their own union’s dues structure, much less a sense of what’s happening across the labor movement as a whole. . . .

Working people in the United States are being hammered by twin crisis affecting what were once called “fringe benefits”: health care and retirement benefits. In recent years, nearly all unions face employer attacks on one or both of these vital lifelines when they go to the bargaining table. . . .

Can strikes work for public employee unions in 2007, when public treasuries are stretched thin? The 1,300 faculty and staff at Community College of Philadelphia answered that question with a clear “Yes!” in a recent two-week strike. . . .

Besides winning better wages, a two-week strike at the Community College of Philadelphia resulted in a new group of rank-and-file activists and a new sense of unity. Photo: John Majewicz.

Can strikes work for public employee unions in 2007, when public treasuries are stretched thin? The 1,300 faculty and staff at Community College of Philadelphia answered that question with a clear “Yes!” in a recent two-week strike.

Last summer, Delphi’s Reynosa, Mexico plant fired 250 workers for failing to purchase expensive safety shoes. Workers say that the shoes were a pretext, that Delphi was cutting production and wanted an excuse to cut its workforce. Auto parts maker Delphi, famous for slashing workers’ wages in the United States, is among the largest private employers in Mexico.

Since last summer’s Reynosa firings, Delphi has refused to pay the workers the severance pay they are entitled to by law. Many of them are single mothers. To add insult to injury, on April 27 the local labor board informed workers that their paperwork had “disappeared.”

Iranian labor activist Mahmoud Salehi was arrested April 9 by government security forces in the city of Saqez, in the province of Kurdistan. Salehi, a former president of the Bakery Workers’ Association of the City of Saqez, had been summoned by police to the office of the provincial prosecutor, under the pretense that the governor and prosecutor wanted to discuss with Salehi his role in organizing upcoming May Day festivities. Yet upon arrival Salehi was apprehended and informed that he had been sentenced to one year in prison, along with a three-year suspended sentence, for his involvement in May Day celebrations in Saqez in 2004.