Iowa Starting Line – Workers Almanac Natural List
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Health Care Workers Say They’re Overworked and Patients Suffer
Share with a friend It’s Thursday, May 29, 2025. Workers at River Hills Community Health Centers in south central Iowa were fed up with being overworked and seeing their patients suffer as a result. So they decided to unionize. Over a hundred workers across six River Hills clinics announced this week in Ottumwa…
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Pensions Are Dead? Not For These Iowa Workers
Share with a friend It’s Thursday, May 22, 2025. Meatpacking workers at JBS plants across the country, including two in Iowa, just ratified a first-ever national contract across all plants. And they got their pensions back for the first time in 40 years. Brazil-based JBS, one of the world’s largest meatpacking companies, and…
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How’s the Labor Market Look for Iowa Graduates?
Share with a friend It’s Thursday, May 8, 2025. Amie here. Happy graduation month to Iowa’s newest high school and college grads! Though they’re graduating into a strong labor market—teens and young 20-somethings have had higher wage growth since 2020, and are more employed than other age groups—Trump’s attacks on the federal workforce, apprenticeships,…
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Find a May Day Rally in Iowa
Share with a friend It’s Thursday, May 1, 2025. Amie here. Happy International Workers’ Day, celebrated by all the countries around the world except the US and Canada (because we’re mad about its socialist underpinnings). It’s also the basis for today’s May Day National Day of Action, put on by grassroots groups like the…
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What Kilmar’s Deportation Means in Iowa
Share with a friend It’s Thursday, Apr. 24, 2025. Amie here. I saw a few “Free Kilmar” signs at the latest protest I covered this weekend, and for good reason: Folks are worried about what it means that the Trump administration is deporting people directly to a foreign torture prison with the flimsiest justification, and…
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Has DOGE Hacked Your Union?
Share with a friend It’s Thursday, Apr. 17, 2025. Amie here. Elon Musk told us DOGE (the “department” of government efficiency that isn’t a real department but definitely gets real taxpayer money anyway) was simply looking into all of our internal systems to tackle “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Turns out that DOGE, which is…
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What Iowa’s Electeds Are (Not) Doing About Tariffs
Share with a friend It’s Worker Wednesday, Apr. 9, 2025. Amie here, and yes, the stock market’s 11% loss is not great for our retirements. But what’s more concerning is prices getting a hell of a lot higher on basic goods in the coming weeks and months. Sure, only one doofus (helped by his…
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651 Laid Off at Whirlpool in Amana
Share with a friend It’s Worker Wednesday, Apr. 2, 2025. Amie here, thinking about the 651 Iowans soon to be laid off by June 1 from Whirlpool in Amana, about a third of its workforce. It’s the biggest mass layoff of the year in Iowa (so far), and the largest since Tyson closed its Perry…
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Anti-Apprenticeship Bill Rushed Through Iowa Legislature
Share with a friend It’s Worker Wednesday, Mar. 26, 2025. Amie here. There are lots of bills winding their way through the Iowa Legislature in a hurry now. But this one stuck out. I mentioned in last week’s newsletter how Iowa Republicans passed a controversial bill stopping local governments from requiring workforce training standards…
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Guess Who’s Unionized?!
Share with a friend It’s Worker Wednesday Thursday, Mar. 20, 2025. Amie here. I’ve written about labor and unions and union organizing in Iowa for Starting Line for a few years now. Yet, I am not, nor have ever been in my journalism career, a card-carrying union member. That is, until today. My…
