With the rise of popular interest in socialism, this book goes beyond promoting efforts boosting needed protective legislation and improved social welfare for working people to look globally at struggles against capital and strategies for winning.
Could a maximum wage gain traction in the United States?
Amid rampant inequality in America, Disney workers’ fight for a living wage could serve as inspiration for others
Thousands of laundry workers—largely African-American or immigrant women—labor in hot, crowded, and often dangerous or toxic conditions to clean the linens used by millions. And it is these workers who endure the consequences of an industry plagued by poor working conditions, exploitation, and abuse.
Three women, all clearly desperate for jobs, arrive for "orientation" at the work room of a meat processing plant. They have been sent by an employment agency as "temporary workers" - a euphemism for low wages, no benefits, short-term contracts with uncertain payroll dates and the most appalling work conditions. So begins Alexander Zeldin's remarkable "immersive" soul-stripping production of "Beyond Caring."
This interview discusses wages, the struggle for $15/hr, stagnating worker incomes, and TPP’s attack on wages in the US and develops into a much broader critique of the current system’s political economy, a way to fundamentally alter the way we produce, distribute, and consume. It is not enough to bargain with capitalists. We must instead look to how workers can take over the means of production and employ them for the benefit and wellbeing of all.
In the wake of the brutal assault upon ... Charlie Hebdo we should be reflecting, not as ... world leaders advise us to, on the attack on free speech, but on .. which spaces and kinds of resistance have been foreclosed to a generation of young working class men and women facing a post 9/11 world of poverty, unemployment and repeated attacks of the West upon predominantly Muslim countries; and ... how the attack ... is being used to serve .. existing imperial narrative.
Corporate interests have taken credit for reducing private-sector unions to a fraction of their former strength, and for eroding public-sector collective bargaining, especially since the 2010 “Tea Party midterms.” A resurgence in low-wage worker organizing, sparked by growing inequality in the United States, promises to help defend the rights—and paychecks—of vulnerable workers. But corporations and their paid shills aim to snuff out the movement before it catches fire.
It's difficult for exploited workers to organize and build popular support. Companies can pack up and move to the next low-wage country where people and governments are desperate for jobs and income, however pitiful. This cycle of exploitation is destined to continue until the world runs out of poor countries to exploit, or until citizens in rich countries, like the U.S. get over their ignorant indifference and face up to their complicity for evil done in their name.
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