Labor Archives - Public Seminar

Labor

Tariffs to Eliminate Forced Labor

Trump’s cynical, ineffective and misguided trade policy

August 27, 2026 • by Thomas Liess and William Milberg

President Trump’s latest effort to impose tariffs on 60 trading partners (collectively accounting for 99.4 percent of US imports) is the use of Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to tax them for failing “to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with ...

Labor

The Artist Status as Managed Retreat

On the Artist Status in Belgium and the underlying issues caused by defunding cultural labor

June 8, 2026 • by Dominick DeJoy

In March last year, several hundred cultural workers gathered at the Place de la Monnaie in Brussels as part of a national strike. They were there because the Belgian federal government was considering whether to limit the Artist Status, a social protection system that provides unemployment benefits to freelance cultural ...

Interviews

Who’s the Boss?

In her new book, Beneath the Wage, Annie McClanahan offers an alternative history of service work that spans Pullman porters and Amazon Mechanical Turk clickworkers

April 27, 2026 • by Annie McClanahan and Lina Moe

Eighty percent of the US workforce now does service work, yet the protagonist that still anchors most histories of capitalism is the unionized, hourly, goods-producing manufacturing worker. In Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work (Zone Books/Princeton University Press, 2026), Annie McClanahan argues that this framing ...

Activism

Children of 2008

A guide to the changing landscape of the labor movement

March 12, 2026 • by Dave Kamper

Solidarity, we’ve always thought, is more difficult at a distance. The great, mythic union victories of the 1930s, like the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936–37, when the United Auto Workers beat General Motors and opened the door to organizing the auto industry, were won by workers who lived and worked ...

Interviews

Fresh Hope for Labor

A conversation with labor historian Dave Kamper on the growing strength of American unions, as recounted in his new book, Who’s Got the Power?

March 12, 2026 • by Shea Dean and Dave Kamper

In his new book Who’s Got the Power? The Resurgence of American Unions (The New Press, 2025), labor writer and organizer Dave Kamper delivers a bit of good news in a dark time. “Much of the last half century has, for the labor movement, sucked beyond the telling,” he writes. ...

Kinships

Family Values or Family Exclusion?

How right-wing policies fail working mothers

January 22, 2025 • by Elide Vincenti

Parental entitlement policies represent a complex interplay of cultural, social, and economic priorities for far-right leaders in both Italy and the United States. On the one hand, many religiously minded conservatives uphold traditional family values, which would seem to support policies that promote marriage and the growth of families. At ...

Body & Mind

The Fashion for Baiting, Brainwashing, and Bullying

How does Brandy Melville continue to tap into the most desperate impulses of being a teenage girl?

December 10, 2024 • by Hannah McIntyre

“From the beginning of the supply chain to the end, we’re all being exploited by the same system” says Chloe Asaam, who represents the Or Foundation. She’s speaking in Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion, an HBO documentary that explores the toxicity of the international brand Brandy Melville. The ...

The Fashion for Baiting, Brainwashing, and Bullying

Capitalism

Who Gets to Retire?

An excerpt from Work, Retire, Repeat

October 17, 2024 • by Teresa Ghilarducci

For the first time in modern American history, gains in retirement time are concentrated at the economic top. ...

Economy

You Are Entitled to Live Your Own Life—If Your Employer Allows It

How the business of cobbling together a living became a new form of unpaid labor

October 17, 2024 • by Phyllis Jeffrey

I know someone, a nurse, who doesn’t have health insurance. His employer, a staffing agency, bounces him from assignment to assignment—sometimes with only a day’s notice. Engaged in skilled care work that is profoundly dependent on the ability to maintain human relationships, he often finds himself treated more like a ...

You Are Entitled to Live Your Own Life—If Your Employer Allows It

Economy

Low-Paid Industries Rely on Gig Workers. Are They Actually Employees?

A new survey sheds light on the working conditions of New York City’s “independent contractors”

October 16, 2024 • by Lina Moe

Ask any organizer and you’ll hear how hard it is to reach gig workers. These workers typically lack a physical place of work or regular schedule (though many work all the time), and their work is poorly measured in Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics datasets. The gig workers ...

Low-Paid Industries Rely on Gig Workers. Are They Actually Employees?

Capitalism

Biden’s Green Protectionism

Behind rhetoric about jobs and green energy is a bid for a $650 billion industry

September 16, 2024 • by Yannis Bougiatiotis

Domestic economic commentators tend to describe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the rise of American green industrial policy along three lines. Lawrence Summers, former United States secretary of the treasury under Clinton, has criticized Biden’s protectionist policies as a “manufacturing-centered economic nationalism.” Nobel laureate Paul Krugman has supported Biden’s ...

Gender

Racialized Redemptive Labor and Sex Work

An excerpt from Elena Shih’s probing book

April 18, 2023 • by Elena Shih

Commercial sex in Bangkok, broadcast through tourist networks, now links the city in many minds with human trafficking—following the global tendency to conflate all sex commerce with sex trafficking. ...