Portside

As many as 400 workers at more than 60 fast food restaurants in the Detroit metro area walked off the job on Friday. The fast food strike in Detroit is the second major labor action to hit an American city’s fast food industry this week: On Wednesday and Thursday, more than 100 workers in St. Louis walked off the job at roughly 30 different restaurants. These rolling walkouts followed similar actions in New York, central Pennsylvania, and Chicago.

Though little remembered now, at the turn of the 20th century Cleveland’s socialists heroically fought Samuel Gompers for leadership of the American Federation of Labor — putting forward a revolutionary alternative to Gompers’s conservative unionism.

In his new book, Unions, Race, and Popular Democracy: Building a Progressive Labor Movement (Cornell), sociology professor Kim Scipes examines parallel efforts to build two CIO unions in the Midwest—via the Steel Workers and Packinghouse Workers.

The Trump administration is attempting to criminalize union members for organizing against its immigration crackdown in Minnesota earlier this year. That’s because it correctly sees labor as a threat to its authoritarian designs.

Kate Bronfenbrenner, who retired this year from Cornell University, has studied how workers win unions, how employers stop them, how organizers can learn from one another for four decades. Her findings have changed how unions think about organizing.

Political trends are shifting faster than we might think