Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other outspoken foes of organized labor like to claim that small business owners are as anti-union as the notoriously anti-union Chamber and its big business members. But don't you believe it.

Unfortunately, plenty of people do believe it. They accept the conventional wisdom that employers, large or small, don't like unions in general and especially don't like their employees joining or organizing unions to represent them in determining their working conditions.

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Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his Web site, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

It was 40 years ago this month that Walter Reuther died in a plane crash. Forty years. Yet the auto workers leader remains an important inspirational figure - a man whose life holds crucial lessons for those who are today seeking to revitalize the American labor movement.
 
I came upon him late in his career, and to me he seemed verbose, distant and a bit pompous: a do-gooder who didn't smoke, didn't drink, didn't wench; who did only good things, and always in the artfully arranged glare of publicity.
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Dick Meister, a San Francisco-based columnist, covered the Caryl Chessman case as a reporter for The Associated Press, correspondent for The Nation
magazine, and commentator for Pacifica Radio, which won a Peabody Award for its coverage. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com.

It's February 19, 1960. Caryl Chessman, tall, broad-shouldered, hawk nosed, sits on the edge of a hard, narrow bed. Clenching his fists and biting his lips, he stares at the bare walls of Cell 2455, Death Row, then out through a small, barred window and across the dark waters of San Francisco Bay – from San Quentin Prison to the lights of the city.

One-hundred miles north, Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, the pudgy, owlish 32nd governor of California, also sits alone, perched on the edge of an overstuffed arm chair. Puffing incessantly on a cigar, he studies the ornate design in the pale green wallpaper that covers the walls of the Victorian parlor of the governor's mansion in Sacramento, as he agonizes over whether to spare Caryl Chessman from execution the next morning.  Outside, I and a half-dozen other reporters, chilling in the harsh night air, anxiously await his decision.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century

It‘s coming up on 10 o’clock in the evening aboard a massive oil rig, the Deepwater Horizon, 130 miles off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s Tuesday, April 20. The rig sways gently in the calm waters. Then, suddenly . . . BOOM!

A huge explosion rocks the rig, releasing tons of oil that soon will spread over an area of at least 2,500 square miles. Of course it’s an environmental disaster, probably the worst oil spill ever. That’s what draws massive attention from the media. But what of the workers aboard the rig, who suffered terrible trauma, serious injury and death? Read more »

Dick Meister, formerly labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half –century.Read more »

Dick Meister, formerly labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century.

We’re coming up on another Workers Memorial Day April 28 - a day when organized labor and its allies honor the millions of men and women who’ve needlessly suffered and died because of workplace hazards and to demand that the government act to lessen the hazards. Read more »

The drive to strengthen workers' rights is one of the most important ever undertaken by an American administration

Hundreds of thousands of workers are being cheated by U.S. employers who blatantly violate the laws that are supposed to guarantee workers decent wages, hours and working conditions.

That’s been going on for a long time, but rarely as extensively as it was during the administration of George W. Bush. Thankfully, Bush is gone. And thankfully, President Obama and his outstanding Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, have this month launched a major campaign to try to overcome the very serious damage of the past.

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Dick Meister, formerly labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half century. Contact him through his website www.dickmeister.com

Although the global recession has had a serious impact on working men and women alike, two new reports make clear that women in the United States and throughout the world have suffered most because of long-standing discrimination. Read more »

The best season of the year is finally here. Baseball season. Sure, it's only a game - but it’s a game that can be very serious business to the young people who play it.

I once was one of them, playing in the 1940s and 1950s on some of the many semi-professional teams that once were common in San Francisco, as in many other cities, as well as on teams in the Mendocino County, Southwestern Oregon and Western Canadian Leagues. Read more »

(Scroll down for a personal note from Dick Meister)

March 31st is a special day in eleven states, including California, and in dozens of cities and counties nationwide-- and should be. It's Cesar Chavez Day, honoring the late founder of the United Farm Workers union on the 83rd anniversary of his birth.

Certainly there are few people in any field more deserving of such an honor, certainly no one I've met in more than 50 years of labor reporting.

I first met Cesar Chavez when I was reporting on labor for the SF Chronicle.  It was a hot summer night in 1965 in the little San Joaquin Valley town of Delano, California. Chavez, shining black hair trailing across his smooth brown forehead, wearing a red plaid shirt that had become almost a uniform, sat behind a makeshift desk topped with bright red Formica, deadly serious but quick to smile. Read more »