Barbara Kopple’s films Harlan County USA and American Dream captured labor struggle as it was happening: on picket lines, inside unions, and under pressure. Decades later, both remain some of the finest labor documentaries ever made.
How Massachusetts Teachers Transformed Their Union
Outgoing Massachusetts Teachers Association president Max Page reflects on a decade of rank-and-file reformers turning a cautious, staff-driven union into a militant, member-led force by striking, winning stronger contracts, and pushing to tax the rich.
The Historic Strike That Transformed the Danish West Indies
In 1916, a mass strike led by black labor organizer David Hamilton Jackson upturned power relations in the Danish West Indies. Its success owed partly to support from Denmark’s labor movement — a true labor internationalism as rare then as it is today.
Strikes Are Down, but Workers Are Rediscovering Their Power
A group of researchers tracking every strike in America for the past five years write that after a promising increase in strikes and number of strikers in 2022 and 2023, strike activity dropped off significantly in 2024 and remained low in 2025.
May 1: Day of Work or Workers’ Day?
In France, May Day has long been a day for all workers to stop working. A recent proposal for some businesses to remain open forced unions to defend the idea that French workers keep May Day as a day to themselves.
Under capitalism, technological “progress” like AI systematically deskills workers, deepens managerial control, and turns the labor process into a site of conflict rather than liberation. This is by design.
May Day: An Answer to Rampant Individualism
Countless influencers and quack positive-thinking gurus tell us that success is all a matter of individual effort. International Workers’ Day reminds us that individuals are happiest when we have others standing alongside us.
Let’s Compare Hasan Piker’s Comments to Elite Centrists’
Statements far more reprehensible than anything Hasan Piker has said are regularly written and spoken by prominent liberals in respectable outlets. But because war and Islamophobia are acceptable in elite Democratic circles, they don’t raise an eyebrow.
How to Buy a Slice of Your Neighbor’s Home and Hike the Rent
A platform backed by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos lets day-to-day “investors” become landlords, twice removed, by buying shares in rental homes. It’s the app-ification of investment in the building blocks of social life.
The Struggle for Democracy in Iran Isn’t Over
After this war ends, Iranians will carry on their struggle for democracy, but against even steeper odds in a society gutted by US and Israeli bombs, under a regime that will use the horror of this foreign intervention to justify more domestic repression.
Neoliberalism didn’t win an intellectual argument — it won power. Vivek Chibber unpacks how employers and political elites in the 1970s and ’80s turned economic turmoil into an opportunity to reshape society on their terms.
The US Government Has the Power to Lower Drug Costs
The American people are now paying the highest prices for medicines that they paid to help develop. Congress and the president have the power to change this — but in the past few decades, thanks to intense drug industry lobbying, they have refused to.
For Pedro Sánchez, Europe Has to Leave the US’s Shadow
Spain’s Premier Pedro Sánchez has emerged as a sharp critic of Donald Trump. But he's also pushed for a broader realignment of European policy, recognizing the need for new international partnerships after the end of US hegemony.
Stop the AI Build-Out, Start the Fight
Across the country, working-class communities are rising up against Big Tech’s data center boom. A moratorium isn’t the end goal — it’s the only leverage we have to force real democratic control over artificial intelligence.
The War on Terror Enabled Donald Trump’s Authoritarianism
Preemptive war without congressional approval and unchecked executive power were normalized during the “war on terror.” Trump is following the path set by Bush and Obama but pushing it to dangerous extremes, writes CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou.