Portside

'What we want today is for this movement to spread,' says a leader of the CGT, which is organizing the protests.

“Songbook” frames its story through the memory of Lucy Parsons, the daughter of a slave who later becomes the widow of “anarchist martyr” Albert Parsons, a white man who had served in the Confederate Army, but then found his calling as a charismatic labor leader. There are unquestionably distant echoes of terrorist activity in our own time in this show, along with enduring issues of income inequality, police brutality, and a compromised judiciary and media.

Some cast the labor movement as dying or even dead, but even amid attacks on collective bargaining workers are finding innovative ways to organize.

The renewed focus, particularly on the left, on precariousness constitutes a recognition of the harsh reality of capitalism, and particularly of today’s globalized monopoly-finance capital. More than a century of Marxian political-economic critique allows us to appreciate the extent to which the conditions that Marx described, focusing on a small corner of Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, are now global, and all the more perilous.

After Occupy in 2011, and the wave of fast-food strikes the following year in New York City, the movement to raise wages took a new turn and a bolder stance: $15 an hour and a union. When the campaign first began, that pay demand seemed like a pipe dream. Yet the call for $15 resonated. Now, the movement has scored victories in two of the biggest states in the country.

For the past three years activists have been fighting hard for unionization efforts for farmworkers supplying berries for Driscoll’s in the United States and in Mexico. In 2014, workers in Washington state went on strike after complaining that the piece-rate wage was set too low. Sakuma Farms allegedly brought in hundreds of guest workers under a H-2A visa program to replace the strikers, The Progressive reported.

This is the first time in decades that a national movement of this scale has come together around a candidate with an unapologetic allegiance to working class concerns and aspirations. It’s evident that there’s broad support in unions for Bernie’s platform—and that many members, fed up with their unions’ legacy of “blank check” support for corporate Democrats, want a more inclusive, democratic process for deciding endorsements.

A majority (53.1 percent) of workers earning less than $12.16 per hour—the bottom 30 percent of wage earners—earn so little on the job that they must rely on public assistance to make ends meet.