Word: union
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...soon as North Carolina's law went into effect in December, Katy Parker, legal director for the state's American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) chapter, started fielding calls. Offenders wanted to know if the law prevented them from going to church; pastors worried it would keep worshippers away...
...special edition of the government gazette decreed that because of inefficiency and unacceptable losses, the state-run utility that provides power to 25 million people in the heart of Mexico had ceased to exist. Its 44,000 employees were immediately terminated, depriving the nation's oldest industrial trade union of its entire membership. The plants were kept running by federal electricity workers bused in to take over...
...recession. Supporters hailed the move as the pro-business President Felipe Calderón's boldest and most effective step toward modernizing the economy - and exorcising the remaining ghosts of the 71-year political monopoly of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that ended in 2000. The company and its union, they argue, were self-serving, inefficient cartels holding Mexico back. It employed too many at inflated wages, they argue, and provided a terrible service characterized by daily blackouts and power surges. "The electricity workers are not victims. They have been looting Mexico for years," said pundit and onetime PRI loyalist...
...Critics, however, were quick to lambast the move as a brutal attack on worker's rights. They charge that Calderón targeted the electricity union for backing his political adversaries and protesting against his free-market policies, and accuse him of seeking only unions that are weak and loyal to the government. The deployment of thousands of riot police to inform his writ underscored such criticism. "The police and military assault on the electricity workers is a serious setback in the precarious democratic life of our country," wrote columnist Luis Hernández Navarro in the daily La Jornada...
...Founded in 1914, the Electricity Workers' Union had kept some families on its membership lists through six generations. It had fervently backed the nationalization of electricity grids, and assumed a central role in the state-run Light and Power company when it was formed in 1960. The union had loyally backed the PRI, but as the country moved toward multiparty democracy, the electricity union veered left, supporting the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), which claims to defend Mexico's workers' rights. PRD lawmakers denounced Calderón's move as unconstitutional, and demanded that it be reversed by Congress. (Calder...