Edging ever-closer to the cancellation of an entire season, the National Hockey League has announced it's
cancelling games through January 14 as the owners and league management are keeping the players locked out.
NHL owners and players are stalemated on their negotiations on a new collective bargaining agreement, and players are voting to decide whether to have the NHL Players' Association announce that it no longer will represent the players. That would allow players to pursue antitrust litigation to have the lockout declared illegal.
Players are expected to approve that measure, but the voting will not be completed until Friday.
Here are a couple links to past coverage of this lockout by way of reminders what's going on here:
NHL owners demanding nothing short of full capitulation from locked-out players
NHL owners hire Frank Luntz to shift blame for the lockout onto hockey players
And more:
- Labor historian and blogger Erik Loomis is under attack by the right for saying on Twitter, after the Sandy Hook massacre, that he wanted NRA head "Wayne LaPierre’s head on a stick." And his university's administration is not standing with him or with academic freedom.
- Feeling like the anti-union laws on the books in his state aren't enough in this age of states passing anti-union laws, an Alabama Republican state senator is proposing to double down on one of the existing ones by putting it in the state constitution:
“It is redundant to a degree, but the redundancy sends a message: We are serious about jobs and Alabama is open for business,” Dial said.
Uh, yeah. Sure. Re-passing a law that's already on the books and that doesn't actually add jobs, just pushes down their pay, shows that you're serious about something, but it's not jobs.
- H-1B visa exploitation:
A federal court jury late Monday ordered Universal Placement International of Los Angeles and its owner and president, Lourdes Navarro, to pay $4.5 million to the 350 Filipino teachers they lured to teach in Louisiana public schools following Hurricane Katrina and forced into exploitive contracts after arriving in the United States through the federal guest worker program.
- In November, Idaho voters rejected a law stripping teachers of collective bargaining rights. But the state's school boards association is trying to get legislators to pass some of the same provisions anyway.
- The IBEW will be airing this ad during football games this Sunday:
- It's always interesting to see the diverse groups of workers who join unions, recently including American Sign Language interpreters, nurses, custodial workers, carwasheros.