Jonathan Sas has worked in senior policy and political roles in government, think tanks, and the labor movement. He is an honorary witness to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. His writing has appeared in the Toronto Star, National Post, the Tyee, and Maisonneuve.
Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein on why today’s union activists should look to the example of North Carolina black and white tobacco workers, who organized a union and went on strike in the teeth of the Jim Crow South.
With his original war aims in shambles, a desperate Vladimir Putin is openly threatening nuclear warfare in Ukraine. The rhetoric of nuclear retaliation and escalation is a risk to the entire world, and, yes, you should be alarmed.
Barry Hines is best known as author of Kestrel for a Knave, adapted for film by Ken Loach. His newly rereleased novel, The Gamekeeper, offers a searing portrait of how capitalism steals nature from working-class people.
Twentieth-century Aboriginal workers laboring for sheep and cattle stations in Western Australia’s Pilbara region endured conditions comparable to slavery. In 1946, they walked off the job — and founded the modern land rights movement.
The mass destruction caused by 20th-century wars created new forms of artifact preservation and exhibition, backed by Western international groups. But calls to repatriate artifacts are calling into question norms of commemoration and public display.
As Quebecers head to the polls on Monday, the waning sovereignty movement has lost ground to insular, xenophobic traditionalism. In an increasingly disenfranchised society, an exclusionary Quebec is a sign of fractured federalism.
Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency has been a destructive clown show. A Lula win today can help rebuild Brazil’s democracy.
Socialist actor, musician, and civil rights campaigner Paul Robeson viewed the Haitian Revolution as a guiding light in the struggle for freedom and dignity. In 1936, he played the revolutionary leader in C. L. R. James’s play Toussaint Louverture.
It’s no mystery why millions of workers are quitting their jobs: pay is low, conditions are terrible, and on-the-job disrespect is rampant. But the best way to transform a terrible job isn’t to leave it — it’s to organize a union.
Enmeshed in a colonial relationship with the US and abandoned by their own establishment politicians, Puerto Ricans are being forced to forge their own recovery after Hurricane Fiona. But they’re also dreaming of a different, more just future.
Black sharecroppers organizing a union were slaughtered en masse 103 years ago this week in the Elaine Massacre. It was one of the US’s worst episodes of racist violence — and a reminder that Jim Crow was about keeping the masses divided and labor brutalized.
British writer Ian McEwan wanted to deliver a literary manifesto for liberal centrism with his new book Lessons. But the result is an aimless, meandering novel that reveals his creative exhaustion and bewilderment at the state of the world.
The Hill has fired Katie Halper from its morning show, Rising, for describing Israel’s policies as tantamount to apartheid. It’s a blatant act of censorship to silence a pro-Palestinian journalist.
Despite fears that a military coup could follow Sunday’s elections in Brazil, the country’s military brass is unlikely to feel threatened enough to attempt one. Whoever wins, the military’s growing institutional hold on power looks likely to continue.
The new Conservative prime minister Liz Truss has experienced a spectacular humiliation during her first weeks in office. Her self-defeating agenda reflects the mindset of a Thatcherite ideologue managing an economy already ravaged by decades of Thatcherism.
The Industrial Workers of the World pioneered a radical unionism that built a small but incredibly dedicated group of unionists and union supporters — which is why American capitalists and politicians quickly decided they needed to stop the union.
The Fed has dropped all pretense of aiming for a “soft landing” as it ratchets up interest rates to fight inflation. It now openly admits it’s trying to create a recession in which millions of people will lose their jobs.
New studies suggest that private equity–owned hospitals and nursing homes deliver worse outcomes and higher costs for patients — weeks after Congress gave private equity firms a new tax break.
Published in 1985, Don DeLillo’s White Noise depicted an America blinded by consumerism. Ahead of Netflix’s adaptation of the novel, it’s worth revisiting DeLillo’s masterpiece, which remains one of our most perceptive visions of contemporary America.
Six Republican states are suing to stop Joe Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan — even though a new study shows that borrowers in most of those states would be among the biggest beneficiaries of the program.