Frances Abele CM is Distinguished Research Professor and Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy Emerita at Carleton University. She is a research fellow at the Carleton Centre for Community Innovation and the Broadbent Institute. Much of her work focuses on indigenous-Canada relations.
After launching a monthlong strike this summer, union grocery workers in Toronto have ratified a contract that improves wages, enhances benefits, and sets a major precedent for the sector.
Whether because of Trump fatigue or COVID or both, the Biden years have been defined by a kind of anti-politics. Many fewer Americans are now paying politics much attention at all.
Most workers in the US are barred from claiming unemployment benefits if they go on strike, penalizing them for exercising one of their most fundamental rights. New legislation in California and elsewhere is trying to rectify that injustice.
Scores of Stop Cop City activists were hit this week with RICO charges and are now facing serious prison time. Prosecutors allege a sprawling, violent conspiracy — but what they’re really doing is trampling on democratic rights as basic as handing out flyers.
As oil became a key energy source in the 20th century, Western companies backed by the US and UK monopolized production in the Global South. But in the age of decolonization, newly independent nations fought for a different global energy order.
Tenant rights groups have been sounding the alarm about an impending post-pandemic eviction crisis. In Los Angeles, that day has come — putting hundreds of thousands of tenants at risk of losing their housing and compelling some to fight back.
Israel’s far-right government has made its oppression of the Palestinians more blatant than ever. German politicians still won’t budge in their uncritical support for Israel, but public opinion in Germany is shifting in the opposite direction.
According to data reviewed by a new climate group in California, the same fossil fuel lobbyists trying to sink climate legislation are also representing the state’s cities and counties being pummeled hardest by the climate crisis.
Despite his towering academic reputation, John Rawls’s ideas have had little impact outside the university. That’s a shame: as the failures of neoliberalism have become increasingly stark, Rawls’s egalitarian theory of justice has much to recommend it.
The inflation rate is cooling, providing a respite for workers. Yet there’s a reason why many are still unhappy with the economy: from health care to housing to childcare, life in the US is more unaffordable than ever.
A strange and beautiful game with a socialist foundation, Disco Elysium’s success seemed like a miracle. When company shareholders eventually fired its creators and stole their work, that was more familiar — and proved why creative workers need unions too.
In Argentina, the meteoric rise of hard-right libertarian Javier Milei has set off alarm bells. To avoid disaster in the October elections, the center-left candidate must convince voters that the welfare state is still worth fighting for.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos often talks about humanity starting again on other planets. But a new project funding Amazon workers’ sci-fi writing is imagining how life could be different right here on Earth, in a world without corporate overlords like Bezos.
This summer’s French riots were a rebellion against police violence and the targeting of working-class men of color. For France Insoumise MP Danièle Obono, it’s high time the country attacked its problem of entrenched racism.
The Biden administration could automatically cancel student debt for all borrowers right now. But its announced “Plan B” for debt forgiveness shows it’s setting itself up to be stymied by the Supreme Court all over again.
An NLRB decision delivered late last month substantially lowers the legal hurdles to union recognition. But using that opening will require unions to build strong cultures of shop-floor solidarity in the face of employer intimidation.
The new HBO docuseries Telemarketers is a wonderfully weird trip through a scammer call center that swindled money for police and lined the pockets of a clutch of entrepreneurial creeps. You should watch it right away.
Howard Buffett, son of multibillionaire Warren Buffett, has long dominated the social and political life of the central Illinois town of Decatur. It’s a case study in how extreme wealth hollows out democracy.
The town of Rugeley, England, once boasted a thriving, unionized coal industry that underpinned the community. Today it is the site of a hyperexploitative Amazon warehouse — typifying the effects of deindustrialization and union decline across the UK.
As Slovakia heads toward a snap election, former prime minister Robert Fico is surging in polls. His Smer party has a record of defending welfare spending — but its scandals and nationalist rhetoric make it hard for many left-wingers to support.