Benjamin Case is a researcher, educator, and organizer living in Pittsburgh.
Many Nordic countries use the “Ghent” unemployment system, where unions rather than the state administer benefits. Some on the Left have applauded this approach — but leftists in the US would do well to avoid it.
Florida’s GOP-controlled legislature just sent Gov. Ron DeSantis a bill that would put more state pension money in the hands of his prospective Wall Street donors. The bill could put DeSantis on the wrong side of a long-standing anti-corruption rule.
As the writers’ strike continues, we should look back at the Hollywood blacklist. The blacklist didn’t just ruin many workers’ careers — it narrowed the range of acceptable movies and contributed to the conservatism of the 1950s.
If you’ve ever visited New York City’s Washington Square Park, chances are good you’ve seen and heard Colin Huggins playing classical music on his piano. Huggins is incredibly talented — and he’s also homeless. Why not make him a city employee?
After claiming for months he wouldn’t negotiate budget cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling, Joe Biden is doing just that. In caving to the GOP’s threats, Biden is empowering them to demand even more.
As capitalism took shape in the United States during the late 19th century, there was nothing metaphorical about the idea of class war. For American workers facing the merciless brutality of employers and the state, it was simply a fact of life.
Electric vehicle manufacturing in the US is overwhelming nonunion, but 1,400 workers for an electric bus manufacturer in Georgia have just unionized. It’s one of the labor movement’s biggest victories in the South this century.
Leader of the French Revolution Maximilien Robespierre is often portrayed as a crazed fanatic. It’s thanks to the work of his equally revolutionary sister Charlotte Robespierre that the egalitarian basis of his legacy survived.
Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac collaborated with the fascist regime in Croatia, whose atrocities shocked even the Nazis. The US Congress then spent years attempting to free him in the name of anti-communism.
In the late 1800s, Southern black farmers built a mass movement to resist oppression. Though often forgotten today, the black populists and their acts of cross-racial solidarity terrified the planter class, who responded with violence and Jim Crow laws.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis has been putting huge sums of state retirement money into underperforming private equity firms that have donated to his campaign efforts.
In Welfare for Markets, Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora show that cash transfers emerged as an alternative to the welfare state favored by a left that had abandoned hope in socialism and a right hostile to democratic management of the economy.
During the Cold War, US sociologists lionized Max Weber as a superior alternative to Karl Marx. For all his brilliance, Weber’s social theory glosses over the violent, exploitative nature of capitalism and serves as a pessimistic defense of the status quo.
Last week at Grinnell College in Iowa, undergraduate resident advisers with the Union of Grinnell Student Dining Workers, the first independent undergrad labor union in the country, went on strike. We spoke with two of the workers about why they walked out.
Philadelphia voters head to the polls today. All eyes are on progressive mayoral challenger Helen Gym. But longtime union organizer Seth Anderson-Oberman is also part of a suite of left-wing challengers on the city council.
A Canadian wealth tax could raise funds sufficient for universal public pharmacare, free tuition for postsecondary education, 100,000 nonmarket affordable homes per year, and a major increase in public transit investment. The country needs a wealth tax now.
Twenty-one members of Congress last week called for lifting US sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela, including most of the Squad. The pushback is needed: sanctions are a cruel economic weapon that hurts average people — and has spurred a surge of economic refugees.
A former teacher and parent organizer, progressive mayoral candidate Helen Gym is hell-bent on making Philadelphia an example for nationwide reforms in health care, public education, and affordable housing.
The US labor movement has a long way to go to reverse its decades of stagnation and decline. But it’s undeniable that things are currently looking up for unions — particularly in rank-and-file workers’ interest in organizing.
France’s interior minister has threatened to ban environmentalist groups said to represent a risk of “violence against property.” It’s part of a worrying clampdown on civil liberties that belies Emmanuel Macron’s supposedly “liberal” politics.