Alex N. Press is a staff writer at Jacobin who covers labor organizing.
At Kaiser Permanente, some 32,000 workers are preparing to go on strike. In addition to proposing measly raises, the health care giant is resisting workers’ desire to have more say in addressing chronic understaffing.
After the deadly tragedy at Astroworld, rapper Travis Scott has announced a partnership with therapy app BetterHelp, sometimes called the Uber of the mental health space. Its business model: ruthless exploitation of both therapists and patients.
When the labor movement collapsed, labor journalism collapsed with it. Today labor journalism is making a curious comeback. But without a truly revived labor movement, the labor beat will remain marginal to big media.
Workers at Kellogg’s cereal plants across the United States are still on strike. As the company drags out the bargaining process, workers, now without health insurance, are demanding a contract without concessions.
As negotiations continue between Kaiser Permanente and the Alliance of Health Care Unions, which represents 50,000 workers at the company, Kaiser’s workforce is preparing to strike. Tens of thousands have authorized a stoppage, should bargaining stall.
Many workers in the United States are forced to stand up while performing duties they could fulfill while seated. It’s pointless and mean-spirited — they deserve the right to sit down.
Halyna Hutchins’s death during the filming of Rust is a tragic consequence of studios prioritizing profit and speed over crew members’ lives. Alec Baldwin’s culpability isn’t about him pulling the trigger on a prop gun — it’s about his and his fellow producers’ cost-cutting decisions.
A 60,000-person strike that would have shut down the film and television industry nationwide was averted this weekend when IATSE reached a tentative agreement with the studios. But contract ratification by the union’s members is far from guaranteed.
Across the US, a more militant mood among workers is beginning to make itself felt. An uptick in private-sector strikes and record numbers of workers quitting their jobs are just two signs that the pandemic has changed workers’ willingness to accept a bad deal.
Around 420 workers at the Kentucky-based Heaven Hill Distillery have been on strike for a month. They say the company is pushing to radically change scheduling and remove a cap on health insurance premiums.
More than 1,400 workers at Kellogg’s cereal plants across the US are on strike. Fed up with 12- to 16-hour days, seven days a week, with mandatory overtime, they were pushed over the edge by the company’s drive to downgrade wages and benefits for new workers.
IATSE members voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike today. In the television and film industry, where long hours and unpredictable schedules are the norm, crew members are being pushed to their breaking point.
When I first heard about Occupy Wall Street, I thought it was goofy, even absurd. Maybe it was. But I joined its encampments anyway. Like countless others, it was the first time radical politics ever reached me.
Capitalism has created a world full of bad and brutal jobs, from meatpackers to drone operators. Capitalists created these jobs — only organized workers can get rid of them.
Over the past decade, sportswriter Dave Zirin has had a front-row seat to the upheavals sweeping professional sports. From Colin Kaepernick to the Milwaukee Bucks’ strike for Jacob Blake, athletes aren’t shutting up and playing anymore.
At the University of Pittsburgh, roughly 3,500 educators are voting on a union. If they win, it will be the largest new union in the United States this year.
A warehouse safety bill proposed in the California legislature could force Amazon to be transparent about its productivity quotas — and threaten the aura of invincibility and omnipotence the company uses to intimidate and silence workers.
At Amazon, big organizing campaigns by established unions — like the one in Bessemer, Alabama, this year — are only the most visible face of labor organizing. The other is Amazonians United, a militant shop-floor group with a presence around the country.
Uber and Lyft said that California’s Proposition 22 would help their drivers. We now have proof they were lying.
Amazon is installing high-tech cameras inside supplier-owned delivery vehicles. Workers say the cameras are a shocking invasion of privacy as well as a safety hazard.