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.
For years, Emmanuel Macron has worked to get rid of the 35-hour workweek and worker protections from unfair dismissal. Today, his government is using the coronavirus lockdown as a pretext to push ahead with this agenda — and allow bosses to unilaterally undermine labor conditions.
The airline industry will not survive the coronavirus. Now is the time to nationalize it — and use this moment to chart a course to a low-carbon future.
Australian workers need an economic bailout to save them from a coronavirus-induced depression. Instead, Scott Morrison’s right-wing government is using the state to attack unions and shovel money to corporations.
Our new political education series, Stay at Home, launches this Thursday at 6 PM EST on our YouTube channel, with special guest Mike Davis.
Even before the coronavirus, the United States’ sanctions against Iran were unconscionable. But now, with one person dying of coronavirus every ten minutes in Iran, the sanctions are killing untold numbers of people. They must end now.
Bernie Sanders can’t continue campaigning as usual, and he certainly can’t drop out of the race. We desperately need Bernie to retool his entire operation to demand a robust government response to the coronavirus — a response the Democratic Party will never spearhead themselves.
Before we hand over billions and possibly trillions of dollars to corporations that have proven time and again that they value profits above all else, we should take a pause. There is time to put people first.
Boris Johnson has always fantasized about being his generation’s Winston Churchill. With his destructive bungling of the response to the coronavirus crisis, he is shaping up to be the British George W. Bush.
Jails and prisons will inevitably prolong the COVID–19 outbreak and increase the rate of infection. Any rational response to the crisis must include a coordinated national effort to get as many people out of jail as possible — fast.
As the COVID-19 pandemic intensifies, our ruling classes are coming to the conclusion that in the contest between loss of profit and loss of life, they choose death.
Joe Biden just abdicated national leadership by disappearing for a week in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. According to mainstream media, it’s no big deal.
Labour MP Navendu Mishra spoke to Jacobin about the UK government’s feeble response to coronavirus — and why workers with precarious income and housing need help now
Cuba is caricatured by the Right as a totalitarian hellhole. But its response to the coronavirus pandemic — from sending doctors to other countries to pioneering anti-viral treatments to converting factories into mask-making machines — is putting other countries, even rich countries, to shame.
Because self-isolation hurts corporate profits, billionaires are calling to end the too-limited public health measures taken so far by the US government. Unless we take action, Trump might heed their advice — and enormous numbers of people could die as a result.
Some of the first US cases of coronavirus came from Washington nursing homes. We spoke to a nursing home worker and in-home care worker in the state about what it’s like providing care in the midst of a pandemic, and the brutal low-wage working conditions, worker shortages, and lack of decent health care that can only worsen the crisis.
Faced with another global recession, many governments are responding with even stronger state interventions than they did in the 2008 financial crisis. But stimulus packages to prop up businesses must also pose the question of public control — not just bailing out corporations, but repurposing their operations to confront the disasters ahead of us.
Brands like Gap and H&M have long been able to shop around for outsourced suppliers, driving sweatshop conditions in newly industrializing countries. But their rising dependence on large, centralized suppliers is undermining the bases of the sweatshop model — and increasing workers’ power to fight for improvements.
In Bernie Sanders, we finally have a presidential contender fighting for the restoration of incarcerated voters’ democratic rights — a long overdue, commonsense reform that could have far-reaching implications for American prisons, the American political system, and, at a time of pandemic, society as a whole.
Toni Van Pelt, the president of the National Organization for Women, recently warned that Bernie Sanders had done “next to nothing for women.” Which is strange, because NOW has praised Sanders as a staunch feminist ally throughout his career.
Enver Hoxha’s Albania is mostly famous for its bureaucratic paranoia, symbolized by its hundreds of thousands of concrete bunkers. His wife Nexhmije was one of the ruling party’s leading figures — and to her dying day defended the brutal measures taken in the name of socialism.