Gabriel Winant is an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America.
Radical labor leader Harry Bridges helped create one of the US’s most powerful unions, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. Its founding principles were anti-racism and worker autonomy, which he learned from rank-and-file dockworkers and seamen.
Health care workplaces have replaced steel mills and auto plants as the nation’s big employers. But while industrial workers once had mighty unions, hospital workers have struggled by comparison to win representation and good contracts.
The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a partnership between socialists and the United Electrical Workers union, is trying to be at the heart of a new mass labor resurgence. Their success could help millions of workers.
India Walton’s victory in Buffalo is an enormous advance. With a clear political strategy, the socialist movement could become less dominated by professionals and more driven by the working-class base it requires.
In an interview with Jacobin, former Labour Party shadow chancellor John McDonnell discusses Boris Johnson’s handling of the COVID crisis, recalls the radical atmosphere of the 1980s Labour Party, and draws the lessons from Jeremy Corbyn’s five years as party leader.
In an interview, longtime socialist-feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham reflects on her decades on the Left, grappling with the reality of being a socialist from the middle class, and E. P. and Dorothy Thompson and the classic book The Making of the English Working Class.
The Culinary Workers Union of Las Vegas has fought bosses for better working conditions, wages, and benefits for decades. But now its leadership is launching a backhanded effort to discredit Bernie Sanders and the very idea of Medicare for All.
Philanthropy thrills to begging and tolerates activism, but cannot abide a demand from those it wants to save.