An epochal general strike of workers in Seattle a century ago was not just an event in labor history but a testament to what workers can achieve when they organize. The book under review charts sharp lessons for today.
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.
Students tend to measure fair compensation on two scales. How many years of training and/or dollars of tuition did a worker have to invest to become “qualified” for the job? And how important is that worker’s labor to the rest of society?
If you’re old, poor, and African American or Hispanic-Latinx, your chances of infection are especially high and odds of survival significantly lower. The economic downturn could drive the number of homeless to 800,000, an increase of 40% to 45%.
Trump has used the same ploy utilized by Hitler: Create the straw dog of racism as a scapegoat to explain the plight of the working class and use this propaganda to convince people to betray their own class interests.
If the work of abolition is not only about stopping prisons, but also about imagining a future in which we win, then people cannot be released from prisons only to be put on the streets or to premature disability at the poultry factory.
Labor organizations and tenants’ associations have a lot of common ground. After all, tenants are workers, and workers need housing. Decades ago, unions built affordable housing cooperatives for workers.
Should anti-capitalists urge a vote for Joe Biden to defeat Donald Trump in November 2020 or not?
If there is a common working-class culture across racial and ethnic groups, as I think there is, white racism cannot be part of what is common in that culture, because about 40% of the American working class is not white.
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