Skip to main content

Why Are The Guards On Strike On 'Orange Is The New Black'? Privatization Got To Them

Mariella Mosthof Romper
One of Orange Is the New Black's greatest accomplishments in Season 3 was exploring the Litchfield guards' inner lives just as deeply, richly, and with just as much complexity as it has the inmates' lives. Rather than set up a false dichotomy where the prisoners are the "good guys" who just got themselves into a bad situation and the guards are the monsters, Season 3 shows us that the guards have it tough, too. So tough, in fact, that they decide to unionize.

Teachers Take On Student Discipline

Samantha Winslow Labor Notes
As education activists draw attention to high rates of suspensions, racial disparities, and the “school-to-prison pipeline,” the political winds are shifting.

Eliminating "Noncompete" Agreements

Kevin Johnson, James Bessen, Michael J. Meurer and Catherin On Labor
The campaign is led by EARN, the Employee Association to Renegotiate Noncompetes, which was formed this spring to combat the negative impacts of noncompetes. It sees Dell's impending acquisition of EMC as an opportune time for employees to press for reform prior to any transition.

The Family

Maxine Scates The American Poetry Review
In Maxine Scates's touching poem, casualties of war are not just soldiers or even surviving soldiers, but the family and its survivors.

Nina Simone's Backlash Blues

John Lahr London Review of Books
A biography of the iconic Nina Simone. Using rare archival footage, audio recordings and interviews (including talks with her daughter and extracts from Simone's private diaries), this examination of her life highlights her musical inventiveness and unwavering quest for racial justice, while laying bare the personal demons that plagued her from the time of her Jim Crow childhood in North Carolina to her self-imposed exiles in Liberia and Paris.

Let’s Stop Downgrading Workers and Jobs in Supply Chains

Steve Cotton Equal Times
Downgrading workers and their jobs in the global supply chains must be stopped. Strong union organising, intelligent union strategies and collaborative working underpinned by robust international standards, is the way to do it.

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

Ashutosh (Ash) Jogalekar The Curious Wavefunction
In what reviewer Ashutosh (Ash) Jogalekar calls a "poignant and beautiful, simple and without frills and from the heart" exposition, Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli guides us through seven of the main ideas of physics. These are, Jogalekar writes, not just ideas that have advanced our understanding of science, but they are also ideas that have "expanded our consciousness and connected us to our origins and future."

Film: The 30 Best LGBT Films of All Time

British Film Institute The Guardian
British Film Institute-Flare: London LGBT Film Festival is 30. Over 100 programmers, critics and filmmakers voted for the 30 greatest LGBT films of all time.

NYC: The Power and Politics of Norman Seabrook's Correction Officers' Benevolent Association

Will Bredderman and Jillian Jorgensen Observer
Politicians are eager to distance themselves after correction officers' union leader Norman Seabrook became the best-connected figure to fall in a corruption investigation by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. Seabrook was arrested on fraud charges, accused of accepting a $60,000 bribe—reportedly delivered by Jona Rechnitz, a donor of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio at the center of a gift-for-favors scandal —in exchange for investing union money into a risky hedge fund.