Even in Trump country, pro-union sentiment is rising. But can labor and its allies turn that sentiment into power?
Amazon plays a key role in the twenty-first-century economy and has shown it’s vulnerable to pressure. Socialists should get jobs there and organize.
Tech has resisted unionization for decades — will that change?
U.S. workers have not given up on unions-a survey of the workforce found interest in joining unions to be at a four-decade high. But few workers who don’t belong to unions will get to join one, since fewer than 1% will experience an organizing drive.
Boots Riley—Oakland activist, musician, and now film-maker extraordinaire—has made labor organizing in an almost entirely non-union industry seem doable and definitely worth the bother.
After several short strikes and on-going organizing, workers at Amazon in Italy signed a contract that improves conditions and pay. This is the first time in Europe that Amazon has been forced by worker pressure to sign a union contract.
Rebuilding the democratic infrastructure is too important to leave up to the consultocracy. Mobilizers only turn out people with whom they agree. Organizers engage these people in reaching out to other people with whom they don’t agree.
More than that, we hope to be a force for building greater strategic alignment and operational unity on a number of different levels: unity of the broadest possible coalition of forces against the Trumpist GOP; unity among the social justice forces that are striving to establish a durable progressive pole in mass politics; and unity between the sectors of the anti-capitalist left are engaged in these efforts and are working to rebuild a durable and fully inclusive working class movement for systemic change.
The election at the LA Times comes on the heels of a recent spate of successful media union drives.
Instead of being sufficiently innovative, says Seattle SEIU Local 775 David Rolf, most labor leaders have been “reinvesting and doubling down on our American system of enterprise-based collective bargaining since the union movement started to shrink in the early 1950s.” The result: “Through decades . . . we’ve seen unions grow weaker and weaker every year while continuing to repeat the same strategic directions.”
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