It is an indictment of the entire restaurant industry.
Our labor has become a commodity, something bought and sold in the marketplace, no different in principle than raw materials, equipment, and the buildings that house our workplaces.
US labor law is designed to prevent railroad strikes like the kind that shook America in the past. But the constant cuts to staffing levels and erosion of conditions for rail workers could produce a national rail walkoff by September.
A number of veteran organizers and labor journalists are publishing books this year that will be of interest to Labor Notes readers. Many of them participated in a "Meet the Author" session at the recent Labor Notes Conference.
For over half a century his reports on the labor movement, in The Nation and elsewhere, were a model of activist journalism.
When it comes to wages, baseball’s billionaires give stadium workers peanuts. Yet since 2011, the teams’ average value has tripled — from $523 million ($680 million in today’s dollars) to $2.1 billion.
Will today’s unions invest big-time in the young workers now beginning to rebuild American labor? Or will they remain AWOL and ensure the movement’s continued decline?
Even among Marx-friendly economists, the labor theory of value has fallen out of favor. But its technical validity is less important than the core message: workers are exploited because the value they create is undemocratically taken by capitalists.
How employers get away with denying workers income they used to earn.
While W. E. B. Du Bois praised an expanding penitentiary system, T. Thomas Fortune called for investment in education and a multiracial, working-class movement.
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