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.
Despite the coronavirus outbreak, the University of Illinois has jacked up health care premiums for graduate workers and refuses to grant additional sick days to those who test positive for COVID-19. This is what workers have to deal with in the corporatized university.
With the appalling Senate scandal over coronavirus insider trading, it is no longer possible to deny it: we are governed by a caste of the unimaginably rich who don’t care if we live or die.
If we are going to avert the worst-case COVID-19 scenario and prevent unimaginable human suffering, we have to fight — and even nationalize — the corporations that are trying to profit off of this crisis at everyone else’s expense.
Faced with impossible choices between going to work and facing potential exposure to coronavirus or staying home and losing needed income, workers at a Brooklyn cafe got organized. To ensure a just response to coronavirus, millions more working people will need to get similarly organized in our workplaces, in our communities, and in politics.
In the face of inadequate health and safety protections against coronavirus on public transit, Detroit bus drivers walked off the job Tuesday demanding management take action. They won.
As Marxist geographer David Harvey argues, forty years of neoliberalism has left the public totally exposed and ill prepared to face a public health crisis on the scale of coronavirus.
COVID-19 teaches us why Medicare for All should be the floor of our demands, not the ceiling. As an epidemiologist argues, we need to radically rebuild our entire public health infrastructure.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen claims to represent the “spirit of Greta,” yet corporate lobbyists have more influence over Europe’s Green Deal than ordinary citizens do. The green transition ought to be controlled by the social majority, so it serves all our needs — not just the businesses who hold sway in Brussels.
During World War II, UAW leader Walter Reuther had a plan to reorient the economy toward needed production, centering the interests of labor rather than markets. As the global health system faces massive shortages in vital medical equipment, Reuther’s blueprints can help us generate our own mass-scale response to the crisis.
The “UBI” ideas being thrown around as a response to the coronavirus are, in many cases, neither universal, basic, nor an income. But they do show how much the Left has shifted what’s considered possible over the past decade.
Companies like Google and Facebook make money not just by predicting our behavior, but by influencing our choices. It’s an intensification of the surveillance that has always been at the heart of capitalism, not a new economic system.
The Democratic Party elite insists nothing can be done to mobilize working-class nonvoters. By challenging their cynicism, Bernie Sanders is rendering a profound service to American democracy.
At the start of the coronavirus epidemic, Norway’s government said it would help businesses by making it easier for them to get rid of workers. But trade unions and left-wing parties fiercely denied that these measures were “inevitable” — and they won a bailout to serve working people, not just their employers.
Containment isn’t enough. We need a wartime mobilization to expand coverage, capacity, and production in order to test, trace, and treat coronavirus. And Bernie Sanders must play a major role in advocating for more aggressive measures.
In 2008, they told us not to “politicize” the crash. We ended up with a decade of austerity. The coronavirus crisis will reshape the economy in profound ways — now is the time to make socialist arguments about how to respond.
The Oakland group Moms 4 Housing is leading a movement to halt gentrification and de-commodify housing. Their victory in California helps pave the way for a militant housing strategy that we can use across American cities.
On Tuesday, despite urgent pleas from public health experts for postponement of the balloting, voters reported being forced into unsanitary environments and jumping through arduous hoops to vote. The culprit was the party that believes in science and voting rights.
Now isn’t the time to blindly follow orders from bosses. To make sure our response to coronavirus is safe and just, workers need to take on-the-job action like sick-outs and strikes — as New York City educators have over the past week.
As COVID-19 continues to expose the failings of the fragmented, profit-driven health system in the United States, the case for Medicare for All is stronger than ever.
The US and UK responses to coronavirus have failed miserably. But Denmark has moved swiftly to help workers by protecting wages and preventing layoffs — showing yet again, in the midst of a pandemic, that we’d all be better off living in a social democracy.