Locked-out Local 814 members have held strong against Sotheby’s for more than 5 months. Despite making record profits last year, the auction house is demanding wage and benefit cuts, and the replacement of skilled Teamsters with unskilled, non-union temps.

Local 805 members have joined the Sotheby’s picket lines along with other Teamster locals and other unions in a display of solidarity in the fight against corporate greed. Public supporters including Occupy Wall Street protestors have also joined the picket lines and staged direct actions.

Effective January 1, these locked-out Teamsters' health care expired. After 5 months without a paycheck, these members and their families are also without health care coverage. Local 805 members have “adopted” members and their families to help provide health care funds.

Kester Charter has heard the promises before, but this time he isn’t biting.

“Cablevision said they would look into wages at other companies, make ours competitive, upgrade the retirement,” says the 15-year cable technician in his gentle West Indian lilt. “They never did anything.”

Charter and 284 other Brooklyn field service workers at Cablevision are readying for a union vote January 26. It’s the fourth attempt to win a union for the techs in two decades, and the first that has withstood the company’s relentless misinformation campaign long enough to proceed to a vote.

Forty-nine years ago, on June 23, 1963, tens of thousands of people gathered here in Detroit, only weeks before hundreds of thousands went to Washington to march for jobs and freedom.

In the Detroit speech, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sowed the seeds of his more widely known speech at our nation's capital. He described his famous vision of a day when the white sons of former slave owners and the black sons of those who had been enslaved would live together as brothers, judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their characters.

Yet we know King's dream was not merely a dream about friendship, not some story about two unlikely friends communing across a great economic divide. His dream was about true equality -- economic, political and social justice.