James Bloodworth is a writer and journalist from London.
The bootstraps narrative is near and dear to Americans’ hearts. But it’s a fiction, one that obscures complex relationships of interdependence and generates a culture of self-blame. It’s time to bust the myth for good.
Emmanuel Macron plans to raise France’s retirement age — but this Tuesday, well over a million people mobilized against him. One of the biggest social movements in years, it has a chance to deal a decisive blow to attacks on welfare.
On June 14, 2017, 72 people died in the Grenfell Tower fire in London. Peter Apps’s Show Me the Bodies is the best account of the tragedy and an unsparing indictment of the disregard for working-class lives that made it possible.
The Bush administration’s war on terror meted out unthinkable violence in the Middle East while imposing an atmosphere of repression and nativism at home. It was the perfectly malignant petri dish for helping produce Donald Trump.
With its upstart golf league, LIV Golf, Saudi Arabia has picked a fight with the American golf establishment. And because that establishment has stiffed so many pro golfers for so long, the Saudis appear to be winning.
As soon as it became electorally inconvenient, the Democrats largely dropped their support for police reform and adopted a crime-fighting approach straight out of the ’90s. The result: shocking police murders like Tyre Nichols’s have become more common.
Prisoners in Massachusetts may soon be forced to choose between their organs and their freedom: Democratic legislators in the state are proposing a law that would allow prisoners to donate organs or bone marrow in exchange for up to a year off their sentence.
In several Canadian provinces, burned-out health care workers are leaving in droves, a result of wage suppression and attacks on workers. The fight for labor rights is key to fixing Canada’s health care crisis.
It’s not that partisan voting patterns are becoming decoupled from class — it’s that a complicated new set of alignments, rooted in the social and occupational structures of a postindustrial economy, is emerging in the United States.
The UK’s neoliberal university system is pushing more and more faculty into precarious, low-paid positions while charging students ever more exorbitant fees.
Unlike with other academic workers, unionization among tenure-track faculty is rare. But unions can make it easier for tenure-stream faculty to fight back against the corporatization of higher ed.
At the October 2022 summit of the National Restaurant Association’s legal wing, union-busting lawyers shared their latest strategies for shutting down workplace democracy. Recent food service union successes, it seems, have worried industry executives.
Given the programs’ popularity, the only way to break Social Security and Medicare is an economic shock. It’s possible that manufacturing such a shock is behind Republicans’ refusal to raise the debt ceiling.
The Index on Censorship, a right-wing nonprofit led by a vicious Jeremy Corbyn opponent that receives funding from the US government, has named Mexican president AMLO its annual “Tyrant of the Year.” Come on.
Today “ethical consumerism” mostly refers to individuals feeling morally righteous about what they buy. But the consumers movement was once motivated by the broader, collective goal of democratic management of the economy.
Much of the world is likely to have a recession this year, and Britain is expected to be especially hard hit. We can thank years of stagnant wages for workers — made worse by the Tories’ return to cruel austerity policies.
The organizer of the March on Washington where Martin Luther King Jr delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech was also the leader of the first successful black labor union. For A. Philip Randolph, labor and civil rights were one and the same.
We are rightly skeptical of apps because the tech industry has plundered the commons, but a new app for union organizing should be given the opportunity to demonstrate proof of concept. Anything that makes union organizing easier has the potential to do good.
Millions of renters are suffering immensely right now as they face down imminent evictions in a housing market that has seen rents skyrocket in recent years. Joe Biden’s recently announced renters relief plan won’t do much to aid them.
Indian economist Amartya Sen has posed a devastating challenge to the dominant capitalist understanding of development. But Sen’s own analytical framework doesn’t go far enough in exposing the inherently exploitative logic of capitalism.