Earlier this year, Republicans in Ohio pushed through SB 5, which would extremely limit public sector unions’ collective bargaining rights, effectively crippling public labor unions in the state. Ohio unions have been gathering signatures to put the law to a public referendum this November, and a recent poll by Quinnipiac shows that if they manage to get the issue on the ballot, it will likely be repealed.

More American side with public sector unions than side with the Republican governors around the country who are trying to take away the union’s collective bargaining rights according to the newest Gallup poll. The poll found 48 percent agree more with the state employee labor unions, while 39 percent agree with the governors.

And young people side overwhelming with the labor unions–by a greater than two-to-one margin.

Buried in the law to reform welfare programs, House Republicans have added a provision to make it more difficult for union members to strike.

As our broken political system slowly turns into a plutocracy where political power flows from the few extremely wealthy individuals and corporations, regular workers united for collective bargaining on wages is no longer good enough. Labor unions should strive to be a force for fully unifying regular people’s collective political and, more importantly, financial power.

The very public fight in Wisconsin over labor unions’ collective bargaining rights seems to have resulted in a strong surge in union pride among labor households, and made liberal Democrats’ support of labor significantly stronger.

With several new polls out about the fight in Wisconsin, the verdict is clear that recent Republican efforts to take away labor unions’ collective bargaining rights is very bad short-term politics for them.

Three months ago in this space, I wrote about Wisconsin governor-elect Scott Walker, who was showboating by making bogus demands and proclamations even though he was still two months from being inaugurated.

It’s probably no surprise that actually taking office hasn’t diminished Walker’s ambitions.

Thirty two years ago today at 10:55 AM, openly gay city supervisor Harvey Milk was shot and killed in his office at City Hall in San Francisco. The message of hope that he preached, however, continues on, and his strategy of building coalitions and rejecting life in the Veal Pen is one progressives need to remember and repeat — that’s how you give hope.

Thanks, Harvey.

More good news for California’s marijuana legalization initiative: UFCW’s Western States Council, representing more than 200,000 union members in the Western US, endorsed Prop 19 yesterday.

The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation was a political party in Canada that formed during the Great Depression. Most of its support came from the rural cooperative movement among farmers. Cooperative members made up a large part of its voters, and many of its leaders had held elected posts in cooperatives. Organized labor was another important part of its base of support. So, when the CCF took control of the provincial government of Saskatchewan in 1944, it passed legislation to increase the power and membership of the organization that made up its base of support.