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.
A collective wail of anguish went up after news broke that Dolly Parton’s working-class anthem “9 to 5” has been repurposed for a Squarespace ad lauding “working, working, working.” Our grief is justified. But the song’s deformation into a hollow jingle says more about capitalism than Dolly.
Jeff Bezos joined Black Lives Matters’ calls for racial justice last year. But Amazon workers in the majority-black town of Bessemer, Alabama are trying to unionize — and Amazon has fought them tooth and nail.
The US Chamber of Commerce is pushing Democrats to slash COVID-19 relief checks for millions of people. And corporate Democrats appear to be listening.
Jeff Bezos is stepping aside as Amazon’s CEO having made a fortune of almost $200 billion. It’s an attempt at reputation rehabilitation — but he can’t escape the legacy of exploitation he leaves behind.
The Italian president has appointed former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi to form a “nonpolitical” government. In fact, this is the latest in a string of technocratic administrations designed to impose unpopular austerity measures — a deeply ideological program that Italians have never voted for.
A British government ad campaign targets lockdown rule-breakers, blamed for undermining measures to tackle the pandemic. But the real problem is the government’s failure to set effective rules to start with — scapegoating individual behavior even as it has allowed the virus to let rip in crowded schools and workplaces.
The Robinhood trading app is an attempt to commercialize a powerful but thoroughly fictional myth: that finance can be democratized while ownership and control remain in the hands of powerful capitalists.
As part of its anti-union agenda, Alberta’s right-wing government has wrested control of workers’ retirement funds from a joint board that gave them a guaranteed say. Workers in the province are preparing to mount a legal challenge to the power grab.
Gig economy companies and organized labor are at war over the future of work and the definition of “employee.” The companies’ strategy has split the labor movement by enticing some unions into a partnership-based company unionism instead of independent workers’ organizing.
There’s wide support for the kind of social-democratic policies Canada’s New Democratic Party should be offering, but the party is afraid to put forward a bold left-wing program that can inspire supporters. The NDP’s history shows how it’s possible for a left party to succeed against the tide.
Drug companies have received over $10 billion from the US government for COVID-19 vaccine production. Yet those companies weren’t required to offer their vaccines at fair prices or share intellectual property rights — and they want to keep it that way.
Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit shows a Cold War world far from the usual Hollywood tropes of freedom-loving Americans confronting evil Russian totalitarians. The villains in this piece aren’t our heroine’s Soviet chess rivals, but the middle-class tyrants of US suburbia.
From GameStop to COVID-19 relief, the past year has given us an abundance of reasons to ignore the advice of neoliberal economists like Larry Summers. There are tentative signs that the Biden administration might do just that.
Despite Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s own admission that reopening other parts of the city like restaurants would be unsafe given COVID-19 infection rates, she is insisting Chicago teachers and students return to in-person learning. The Chicago Teachers Union has voted to defy the mayor, refusing to return to schools under current conditions.
Community organizer Carroll Fife is preparing to enter city hall in Oakland. She joins part of a wave of left-wing insurgents unseating neoliberal officials across the country, and she’ll be working to build municipal power from the bottom up.
The forgotten war in Afghanistan, a senseless waste of money and lives, will soon turn 20, and there is no sign that Joe Biden is serious about ending it. When it comes to US militarism, the much-heralded leftward shift in American politics has so far had little effect.
The far right is dangerously obsessed with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow left-wing members of Congress. They deserve the Left’s solidarity.
Karen Nussbaum was a cofounder of the pioneering labor-feminist organization 9to5. In an interview with Jacobin, she discusses why working women in the 1970s needed to organize as workers, 9to5’s hilarious tactics, and why “individually self-reliant but collectively powerless” women workers today still need to organize on the job.
For today’s feminists, labor militants, and socialists, the vision of feminist labor organizing that guided the women’s white-collar organizing project 9to5 — and immortalized in the classic comedy 9 to 5 starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton — should still be our north star.
Republican senators are offering a new COVID-19 relief framework that would limit survival checks to $1,000 and cut off aid to millions more Americans — and President Joe Biden seems open to some of the GOP’s restrictions.