The luxury Midtown Athletic Club in Chicago told its housekeepers they would be laid off on May 1. The workers saw the move as retaliation for their organizing efforts — and when they went public, the club fired them again, effective immediately.
Amid a housing crisis that is leaving thousands of its students and employees homeless, the University of California is bailing out private equity behemoth Blackstone, siphoning billions of dollars to privatized student housing and corporate landlords.
Chicago’s working-class neighborhoods have been exploited by predatory financial institutions and starved of desperately needed investment. Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson could change that by creating a public bank.
Some thinkers are arguing that capitalism as Marx defined it is over, and we’re entering something like digital neo-feudalism instead. Not true, argues Evgeny Morozov. To understand how capitalism operates today, Marxists have to drop the factory bias.
Workers at an Apple Store in Kansas City say they were fired in retaliation for trying to form a union. It’s another episode in the wave of labor organizing hitting big corporations in the US — and those corporations responding with illegal union busting.
A new report confirms that insecure and precarious work is widespread across the economy. To respond meaningfully to the needs of workers, the labor movement must grapple with the harmful impacts of precarity.
For decades, Vladimir Putin has warned that Russia is on the path to extinction. His war has killed untold numbers of people — but it’s also an attempt to force millions of people into Russian citizenship.
Bernie Sanders is calling for a reduction in the workweek to 32 hours, at full-time pay. He’s absolutely right. Gains in productivity should serve the working class.
Ten years since its creation, the Alternative für Deutschland has established itself as a constant presence in Germany’s parliament. Now, it’s challenging the Christian Democrats — and seeking to tear down the historic barriers to the far right.
Setting up 250 picket lines across the country, 155,000 members of the Public Service Alliance of Canada have gone on strike. The walkout, the country’s largest strike ever against a sole employer, is a fight against inflation eroding wages into a pay cut.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, the EU granted asylum to millions of Ukrainian refugees. However, international students and other non-Ukrainians caught in the conflict have struggled to receive similar protection.
There’s no reason to venerate the framers of the US Constitution. The document they created was explicitly designed to check the democratic will of ordinary people and protect the plutocratic interests of the propertied elite.
The Farmer-Citizen Movement topped last month’s Dutch elections, claiming to stand up for overlooked rural populations. Yet the party is really a creation of a marketing agency — and its political agenda is a call to allow multinationals to go on polluting.
Spain’s labor minister, Yolanda Díaz, is a Communist — and her success restoring workplace protections has made her the country’s most popular politician. Now her new electoral platform Sumar is trying to use that popularity to revitalize the Spanish left.
In the early 1900s heyday of the Socialist Party, Texas boasted a vibrant state party that attracted oppressed farmers in droves. The Texas Socialists promoted both land reform and labor rights — and forged a powerful farmer-labor bloc that reshaped US politics.
The operative leading Ron DeSantis’s super PAC is closely associated with conservative activist Leonard Leo, the beneficiary of the largest dark money donation in US history. But Leo’s not putting all his eggs in one basket for the 2024 presidential election.
Over the past year, the sources of inflation have shifted dramatically: rather than rapid income growth, the main driver now is a lull in productivity growth — a problem the Fed’s interest rate hikes can’t do anything to solve and that is probably temporary anyway.
Tax leniency for the rich and austerity for workers and young people are standard Republican fare. What’s notable this time is using government default as leverage for those tax breaks and austerity. If the GOP pulls it off, it will set a frightening precedent.
When politicians threaten police power, police often take matters into their own hands, frequently causing social chaos by refusing to perform basic duties. That’s likely to occur in Chicago. In fact, it might be happening already.
Austria’s Social Democrats are welcoming a wave of new members, after left-winger Andreas Babler announced his candidacy to become party leader. His declared goal: to make the Social Democrats a workers’ party again.