Labor Archives - Page 3 of 7

Democracy

The GOP Reshaped America to Hold Onto Power—Can the Dems Do the Same Thing to Save It?

Mitch McConnell understands holding minority power requires ruthless brutality

September 24, 2020 • by Thom Hartmann

In the power grab to fill the Supreme Court seat announced the same evening as the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Mitch McConnell didn’t do anything new. The GOP has a long history of playing hardball power politics. In the late nineteenth century, Republicans added four states (Nevada, Colorado, North ...

The GOP Reshaped America to Hold Onto Power—Can the Dems Do the Same Thing to Save It?

Labor

In Honor of Essential Workers

Take a minute on this Labor Day to think about a future for labor beyond Trump

September 3, 2020 • by Helaine Olen

----------- This is our fourth Labor Day weekend in Trump’s America. In no way, can we say it is a good year for American workers. We plunged from record employment to near Great Depression levels of unemployment within a matter of weeks, as the nation all but shut down in response ...

History

A Monument to Dis-Union

The West Virginia Coal Miner statue ignores race, class, and history

July 16, 2020 • by Steven Stoll

During our present twilight of the statues, when citizens across the country force the removal of effigies that represent racism and colonialism, Jackson is an obvious target for removal. Yet I’ve been thinking of another statue just a few yards away from Jackson: The West Virginia Coal Miner, a monument ...

Finance

#Unis4all: An Open Letter to the U.S. Higher Education Community

Universities can immediately bypass feckless state and federal legislatures and finance themselves directly with “Unis” supported by the Federal Reserve.

May 22, 2020 • by Scott Ferguson, William Saas, Maxximilian Seijo and Benjamin Wilson

In truth, however, the collapse of the American university is far from inevitable. As the present health emergency suggests, moreover, it will take more than business-as-usual to remediate its long-standing structural inequalities and injustices, according to an emerging minority of educators, staff, and students. In our capacity as a 501(c)(3) dedicated to bringing accurate and ...

#Unis4all: An Open Letter to the U.S. Higher Education Community

Labor

Why the Pandemic Paves the Way for Labor Reform

COVID-19 is a natural disaster, but the plight of American workers is man-made.

May 21, 2020 • by Sharon Block and Benjamin Sachs

Every worker in America has been affected by the coronavirus. Since the stay-at-home orders went into place, more than 30 million Americans have applied for unemployment benefits. Millions more, deemed “essential” workers, are taking life-threatening risks by simply continuing to do their jobs. Others are sudden telecommuters, putting in three hours a day extra on ...

Why the Pandemic Paves the Way for Labor Reform

Public Health

How Dog-Whistle Racism Is Sabotaging the Postal Service

And threatening to gut the Black middle class

May 7, 2020 • by Amy Traub

Since Benjamin Franklin was appointed the first Postmaster General by the Continental Congress in 1775, the United States Postal Service has survived wars, depressions, natural disasters, and crises of all kinds. But it may not survive Donald Trump. The Postal Service faces a $13 billion revenue loss this fiscal year alone, as Americans send fewer letters and packages in ...

How Dog-Whistle Racism Is Sabotaging the Postal Service

Labor

Sick From Work

COVID-19 and the crisis of occupational safety and health in meatpacking

April 14, 2020 • by Paul Apostolidis

“The guy at the plant said they had to work to feed America.” That’s what The New York Times reported Willie Martin said about his mother, Annie Grant. She had been one of the latest of a growing number of meatpacking workers to contract the coronavirus: in her case, it ...

Past Present

The Precarious Labor of the Fitpro

Interrogating the Political Economy of Fitness in American Life

December 16, 2019 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

These well-meaning students weren’t drunk on endorphins. Given the high price they paid for membership and training, and the picture of happy, toned affluence I projected in my hundred-dollar leggings (payment for teaching a class in an upscale boutique), while both correcting their form and calling out advice about life ...

Migration

Post-Workers of the World, Unite!

Reconciling Open Borders and Post-Work Politics

December 6, 2019 • by James Chamberlain

Labour party members passed a motion at the 2019 conference asserting that “free movement, equality and rights for migrants are socialist values and benefit us all.” This socialist framing of freedom of movement emphasizes that migrants are workers and marks a clear contrast with Bernie Sanders’s description of open borders as a “right-wing ...

Uncategorized

Banner Tales

Material culture and the making of solidarity

July 6, 2019 • by David Featherstone and Diarmaid Kelliher

The miners’ strike workshops were developed alongside an ongoing project called Banner Tales, which is a collaboration between geographers and Glasgow Museums staff. This work has encouraged us to reflect on the relationship between material cultures and the makings of solidarity. In both projects we have been involved in using banners ...

Uncategorized

The Unemployment Rate Is Not a Fact

Our country’s most trusted economic metric is only a political artifact.

July 5, 2019 • by Patrick Sheehan

The year was 1875 and Carrol Wright was upset. The mustached state senator from Massachusetts thought that American workers had a problem. Just not the problem that the workers thought they had. Following the financial Panic of 1873 and nosediving wages, Americans were launching wildcat strikes, torching railroad stations, and fighting ...

Feature

How the North American Free Trade Agreement ruined Nourishment

A Review of “Eating NAFTA”

June 13, 2019 • by Alexandra Délano Alonso

Eating NAFTA demonstrates the urgency of responding to a clear and yet mostly invisible health crisis that manifests across borders. It offers tools for rethinking existing approaches to trade and food systems from a transnational, intersectional and structural perspective that shifts the blame that public institutions have placed on individuals (particularly ...