Labor Archives - Page 2 of 7

Capitalism

Ending Exploitation in the Fashion Industry

Towards a labor-centered notion of sustainability

July 26, 2022 • by Nandita Shivakumar and Aabid Firdausi

Instead of empty commitments to sustainability that at best result in greenwashing, there needs to be urgent structural transformations in the global garment industry. ...

Ending Exploitation in the Fashion Industry

Labor

People Do Not Live with Indignity Forever

June 7, 2022 • by Annelise Orleck

On May 3, I—and about a hundred million other women—was reeling in the aftermath of Associate Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s contemptuous assault on women’s bodily autonomy. We had learned about it that day because of a leaked draft decision that will eliminate the right to safe, legal abortions in ...

People Do Not Live with Indignity Forever

Interviews

A Hotbed of Anarchism and Clam Pasta

Labor organizing and espionage in Joseph Matthews’s new novel, The Blast

May 18, 2022 • by Joseph Matthews and Evangeline Riddiford Graham

There was a great variety of tremendously active Left formations in San Francisco in 1916, and I wanted to explore that variety within the context of the novel....

History

The Blast

An excerpt from a new novel about the radical Left in 1916 San Francisco

May 18, 2022 • by Joseph Matthews

Adding to the cannery women’s travails was their invisibility to—the willful blindness of—the city’s traditional labor unions. The women had no specific skills, the labor leaders would say when pressed, and did not fit any particular craft or trade union, so their requests to the central labor council for some ...

Economy

Corporate Handouts Are Leverage

States and cities can make free money less free, if they try.

November 22, 2021 • by Pat Garofalo

Last month, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, as part of an ongoing fight he has with the Republican-controlled state legislature over the minimum wage, released an executive order requiring corporations that receive tax incentives or grants from the state to pay the same minimum wage that state contractors must pay ($13.50 an hour, increasing to ...

Labor

The Orchids That Bloom in the Dark

The migrant domestic workers of the U.K. organization Waling Waling are fighting for their dignity and human rights

November 17, 2021 • by Annelise Orleck

On a warm, wet London Saturday, a group of Filipina women meet in Regent’s Park. They are joined by a few friends from North and West Africa, several small children, and a couple of men recording the event on camera. They spread blankets on the grass which they quickly cover ...

Capitalism

A Displaced Worker in a World of Goods

What Winslow Homer’s Old Mill teaches us about the world industrialization made

September 28, 2021 • by Steven Stoll

A woman in a red jacket, lunch pail in hand and eyes forward, travels to work. She ascends a ramp leading from a meadow of wildflowers, over a millpond to a small water-powered textile factory. Winslow Homer painted Old Mill in 1871, but its subject looks back fifty years to the first ...

Podcast

Human Evolution Has Left Us Ill-Prepared: A Conversation with Emily Guendelsberger about Work in the 21st Century

Unproductive Labor, Episode Four

July 6, 2021 • by Luke Mergner and Pete Sinnott

In this episode, we have a conversation with Emily Guendelsberger, author of What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane. She worked at Philadelphia City Paper, the Onion’s A.V. Club, Philadelphia Weekly, and the Philadelphia Daily News, and has contributed to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Washington ...

Podcast

For Only $184 million You Can Have a Bespoke Labor Category For Your Business: A Conversation with Alex Press about Gig Work

Unproductive Labor, Episode Two

June 7, 2021 • by Luke Mergner and Pete Sinnott

In this episode, we have a conversation with Alex Press, a staff writer at Jacobin magazine who covers a range of topics around labor in the United States, including the gig economy. We talked about the gig economy, what’s at stake for companies in and workers in categorizing workers as employees, ...

Economy

The Hidden Costs of Unnecessary Work

By reevaluating the role of work, we can remake our economy and our lives

April 18, 2021 • by Jared Spears

_____ As America looks cautiously toward economic “reopening” post-pandemic, most official prescriptions tend to share a fundamental premise: rebounding to pre-pandemic G.D.P. growth and pursuing the promise of new employment opportunities in the private sector. President Biden’s "Build Back Better" climate and economic recovery plan has been geared toward putting Americans back to ...

Higher Ed

The Education Trap

Schools and the remaking of inequality in Boston

March 22, 2021 • by Cristina Groeger

————— Despite its centrality in public life and scholarly debate, education, surprisingly, has not been a chief focus of political or economic histories of the modern United States. The role of schools, however, has been fundamental to American historical development in several key ways. Politically, education was a key driver of ...

Race

I Am a Man

As the nation looks for justice in the George Floyd murder, activists embrace the world Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned during the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike

March 18, 2021 • by Mark Allan Williams

_____ Martin Luther King encapsulated all that Black Americans demand and deserve from their country into one sentence: “All we say to America is, ‘Be true to what you said on paper.’” King spoke those words on April 3. 1968, during what is remembered as the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, ...