The National Labor Relations Board has taken a more forceful pro-labor stance as strikes and organizing efforts ramped up. Potential new leadership and a series of court decisions threaten those efforts.
A Review of Joe Burns' Class Struggle Unionism by the editor of UE News
The United Electrical Workers was one of America’s mightiest unions. Many leaders were leftists who challenged corporate power, so UE was decimated by McCarthyism. The union survived and UE's model of militant, democratic unionism can revive labor.
Labor is going into a new decade weaker than it’s been in nearly a century. But the year was a promising one for those looking for sparks from the US working class — and hoping the new decade can stoke those sparks into a flame.
Absent a bold, well-articulated working-class program, labor’s agenda risks being crushed by the Democratic Party’s traditional pro-corporate and discredited neo-liberal ideology.
For the #MeToo moment to become a meaningful movement, it has to focus on actual gender equality. Lewd stories about this or that man's behavior might make compelling reading, but they sidetrack the real crisis... Until we effectively challenge the ideological underpinnings beneath social policies that hem women in at every turn in this country, we won't get at the root cause of the harassment.
In this conversation, the two writers and organizers examine what a revived socialist movement could mean for unions—and the broader push for workers’ rights and dignity.
Invitation to the thirteenth biennial APALA Convention– Organizing In Solidarity, Building One Vision Forward! The convention will be at the Wyndham Bayside in San Diego, CA from August 13-16, 2015.
As CAPITAL & MAIN's “State of Equality” series has documented, economic inequality poses a grave threat to California’s future. Conditions would be far worse if not for progress made by activists, community leaders and lawmakers. In the last several years, California has generated some of the nation’s most innovative and effective strategies to reverse inequality. Here Judith Lewis Mernit lists 10 landmark achievements worth celebrating,emulating and strengthening.
Anti-union forces can taste the blood in the water, and their offensive is only getting broader. Between efforts to pass right-to-work laws at the state and local levels and legal challenges like Harris v. Quinn and Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, the legal-institutional basis of US trade unions is being dismantled. And once that’s lost, it will probably be impossible to bring unions back as they were before.
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