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.
For most of his campaign, incumbent senator and Green New Deal cosponsor Ed Markey was losing to Joe Kennedy III’s well-funded and establishment-backed primary challenge. Markey won by doing something few Democrats today are willing to: embracing the Left.
Leading men’s tennis players are in preliminary discussions to form a union. Pro sports unions can wield enormous power — but they’re also not always easy to organize.
As the GOP demands college football teams start the season, new research shows that coaches are getting very rich off a system that prohibits athletes from joining a union and being paid for their work.
Seventy-five years ago today, Vietnam launched a bid for national freedom with its Declaration of Independence. The French colonial regime answered with brutal repression, kick-starting thirty years of destructive conflict.
Eugene Debs’s unswerving commitment to democracy and internationalism was born out of his revulsion at the tyranny of industrial capitalism. We should carry forth that Debsian vision today — by recognizing that class struggle is the precondition for winning a more democratic world.
New York City teachers stood ready to strike until a deal was reached with the city government today on how to reopen safely. But budgets are strained, the uncertainties are great — and teachers will be watching closely to make sure Mayor Bill de Blasio follows through on his promises.
There’s a brutal history of US intervention in Central America, culminating in the cruelty of today’s border regime. Salvadoran journalist Roberto Lovato speaks to Jacobin about the amnesia that is taking root, and the need for a militant excavation of personal and collective stories.
Canada’s investor class has enjoyed decades of high profits from real estate, but the national housing crisis reveals the toll this has taken on working-class people. It’s all a textbook example of the private housing market’s inability to meet society’s housing needs.
Thomas Frank’s brilliant new book The People, No focuses on the long elite tradition of anti-populism. But it is really an urgent plea to liberals and radicals alike to embrace a left populism and universalism — or keep on losing.
Democrats killed legislation protecting California homes and schools from oil and gas operations after big campaign donations and industry-funded junkets.
Finland’s social-democratic prime minister, Sanna Marin, has called for a six-hour workday without loss of pay, allowing Finns more free time and a fairer distribution of employment. As the pandemic forces us to reassess how working life is organized, we should take up labor’s historic call for a shorter workday.
In the wake of this month’s devastating explosion in Beirut, French and American leaders have made a show of pledging their support to Lebanon. But many have greeted these messages with suspicion in light of the disastrous history of French and US involvement in the country since it attained independence in 1943.
More than any other actor of his era, Chadwick Boseman, who played a range of black heroes from Thurgood Marshall to T’Challa, had a capacity to inspire his audience and evoke a sense of pride in the triumphs and struggles of black people.
Strippers have at least one thing in common with Uber drivers: they’re the victims of rampant labor misclassification at the hands of their bosses. But Brandi Campbell, an adult dancer in Ohio, fought the practice in court and won. The law is clear: strippers are workers with the right to unionize and strike.
The global oversupply of oil and gas before the pandemic, plus the massive slump in demand as a result of lockdown, has put the profitability of the sector in extreme crisis. The case for nationalizing energy production has never been stronger.
Shinzō Abe became Japan’s longest serving prime minister thanks to the weakness of his political rivals. But Abe never realized his dream of rewriting the Japanese constitution to legitimize the nationalist militarism that was central to his worldview.
Ed Markey, the Democratic Massachusetts senator facing a tough primary challenge from Joe Kennedy III, is known for the Green New Deal — but he also has a history of drawing the ire of Wall Street.
Student workers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have used their union to fight for decent pay, better working conditions, and substantive safety measures in response to coronavirus. Three of those workers explain how they did it.
Polish director Andrzej Wajda created an exhilarating form of political cinema that helped shape events as well as depicting them on screen. His films stand as a powerful document of working-class history in Poland, and a glimpse of a socialist democracy that might have been.
Professional athletes have an enormous amount of power that they put to good use this past week in a series of unprecedented strikes. But workers of all types have similar kinds of power — and could, just like athletes, use it to shut society down to fight injustice.