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.
Yesterday, we were treated to a telling contrast: Joe Biden bombed Syria without congressional authorization, and then refused to lift a finger when the Senate parliamentarian slapped down a minimum wage increase. It’s a pathetic reflection of Biden’s twisted priorities.
The standoff between Facebook and the Australian government has ended with Facebook agreeing to pay off news companies. But the deal won’t help journalists whose wages and conditions have been under constant attack, unless they start organizing to defend their rights.
Pushing through a $15 minimum wage wouldn’t just be an economic gift to workers — it would be a political gift from the Democrats to themselves. Inaction, on the other hand, would hand a historic favor to the far right. Biden is committing a huge blunder by wavering.
Few industries in the United States expose workers to COVID-19 at higher rates than the meatpacking and food processing sector. We spoke with a worker at a Tyson poultry plant in Arkansas about his fear of getting sick, what Tyson thinks of its workers, and how long it’s been since he received any hazard pay.
As the legal marijuana industry continues to expand across the United States, unions are expanding with it. We spoke to a weed worker in Chicago who’s in the middle of a union drive at Windy City Cannabis about how low pay, dangerous working conditions under COVID-19, and a lack of “democratic control” on the job led him and his coworkers to organize.
The new film Nomadland is a heartfelt look at the lives of itinerant Americans cast aside by the Great Recession. But it ignores how employers like Amazon are raking in profits off this new class of worker.
During the Korean War, the United States inflicted unimaginable horrors on the Korean people. Yet today Americans know almost nothing about their government’s role in war crimes and atrocities.
Germany’s employment model is under attack, as mass closures and cost-cutting businesses make once-stable engineering jobs ever more precarious. Some trade unionists have turned to worker buyouts as a means of saving jobs — a move that hands workers more control of their situation, but also brings dangers of its own.
A confidential memo now circulating spells out exactly how Vice President Kamala Harris to help push through a $15 minimum wage. There are no excuses for inaction.
After more than two decades, New York’s storied tabloid, the Daily News, finally has a staff union again. But with the paper’s sale to Alden Global Capital, a rapacious hedge fund notorious for crushing newsrooms, the union is going to have its work cut out for it just keeping the paper alive.
Historian Walter Scheidel claims to have found the surprising secret of Europe’s rise to world domination: the collapse of the Roman Empire. Scheidel’s work is an impressive, globe-trotting feat of scholarship, but his argument ultimately fails to convince.
Countless sectors in the US, like the dairy industry, couldn’t run without undocumented workers. Yet those same workers are denied their basic rights and subjected to the constant threat of deportation — dehumanizing and terrorizing them while weakening the power of the broader working class.
Unions are pushing Congress to pass the most comprehensive labor law reform bill in decades, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act. What exactly would it do? We spoke to a labor lawyer about how the act would help workers organize unions — and strengthen the power of those unions once they’re organized.
The United States is the only industrialized country in the world not to federally mandate paid sick leave. Walmart, McDonald’s, and other giant corporations are trying to keep it that way.
Legendary indie singer-songwriter Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes talks to Jacobin about the Iraq War, protest music, and what a more egalitarian music industry would look like.
Born into a blue-collar family on the eve of World War II, Curt Sørensen became Denmark’s most prominent Marxist intellectual. He insisted that Marxism wasn’t just a tool for academic analysis — rather, it had to be an aid to the workers’ movement, learning from and feeding back into practical efforts to achieve socialism.
The recent meltdown of Texas’s energy grid during a spell of extreme weather made it extremely clear for everyone to see: a for-profit, free-market-oriented energy system is bound to fail massive numbers of people.
After promising to be “the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen,” Joe Biden is staying silent as Amazon workers try to unionize in Alabama. It could be because he’s just being Joe Biden — or it could be because of the massive leverage and influence the company exerts through its size.
A sexist outburst from Japan’s Olympics chief derailed preparations for the rescheduled Tokyo Games and provoked an international furor. Mori Yoshiro’s antiquated attitudes are rooted in a conservative, authoritarian worldview that’s deeply entrenched on the Japanese right.
The 320,000 members of the International Association of Fire Fighters have begun voting for a new president. In Mahlon Mitchell, they have a chance to elect a 2016 DNC delegate for Bernie Sanders from Wisconsin who fought back against former governor Scott Walker’s vicious union-busting.