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.
On Monday, Italy began to ease COVID-19 restrictions, with more than 4 million returning to work. But some, like delivery workers, never stopped working — nor organizing for labor rights in an industry deemed “essential” and putting workers at serious health risk.
Decades after Upton Sinclair exposed the horrors of meatpacking, radical labor organizing transformed the industry into a bastion of worker power. Now, a century later, after decades of union-busting and the coronavirus decimating workers throughout the industry, the meatpacking industry is back to The Jungle.
The Australian Labor Party’s Kristina Keneally is using the lockdown to call for a reduction in immigration once borders reopen, citing the nativist trope that migrant workers are driving down wages. But it’s not immigrants that have driven down Australian workers’ wages — it’s the Labor Party’s own history of neoliberal policies.
Eighty years ago today, the leadership of the ACLU voted to expel labor radical and founding member Elizabeth Gurley Flynn for her Communist Party membership. It was a stunning capitulation to red-baiting — and a reminder that liberal-radical alliances are often a tenuous thing.
May 8, 1945 brought the end of World War II in Europe and the final liberation of German-occupied territories. But the creed of restored national independence wasn’t extended to Africa — and that same day, French colonial forces launched a wave of repression in Algeria that killed thousands.
Labour’s new leader, Keir Starmer, wants the Left to embrace patriotism. But rather than bowing to the totems of faith and flag, Labour should be drawing on the best of its own traditions — those of dissent, mutual aid, and a radical solidarity that refuses to be content with inequality or injustice.
Companies like Shake Shack, Ruth’s Hospitality Group, the Los Angeles Lakers, and J. Alexander’s Holdings drew from the Paycheck Protection Program established to aid small businesses in paying their employees. While average workers have suffered under the pandemic, these huge corporations have helped themselves to enormous amounts of cash.
Elon Musk drew attention recently for announcing the name of his and Grimes’s new baby, X Æ A-12. But what’s more disturbing about Musk is the anti-democratic, quasi-eugenicist views that he and other tech elites espouse.
Platforms like Airbnb claim to be building online “communities” — even as their business undermines the real communities in cities. But the history of cooperatives shows that it really is possible to democratize the services we use — so long as it’s connected to a wider redistribution of power in society.
The oil industry, long characterized by boom and bust cycles, has crashed, with prices hitting below zero. The White House will reach for a corporate bailout, but now’s the opportunity to move away from oil extraction and build a rational system of clean energy.
A chorus from politicians and mainstream media is rising to demand we “look forward, not backward” on the criminally negligent US response to coronavirus. The aim of these arguments is simple: to block efforts to hold Donald Trump and his cronies accountable for their incompetence and malice.
The anti-colonial struggle of the twentieth century wasn’t just about winning political independence — it was about shattering the global hierarchies that subjugated the Global South and winning an egalitarian world for all.
Across France, workers are insisting that they be allowed to make masks and ventilators rather than continue with business as usual. Their initiatives show that when workers, not stock prices, decide what’s being made, production can serve the needs of society as a whole.
It’s not easy to imagine a Marxist love story. But in Normal People, Sally Rooney shows how our personal relationships — and the troubles we encounter — are inextricably bound to the society around us.
The Federal Reserve has stepped in to deal with the coronavirus pandemic — unsurprisingly, as is so often true of the Fed’s intervention, on the side of the wealthy. We have to demand that the Central Bank act to aid the working class instead.
The extraordinary generosity of ordinary people and the immense courage of essential workers have been on full display throughout the pandemic. We need to build an economy that harnesses this basic goodness in humanity — and guarantees every worker the dignity, safety, and material well-being they deserve.
Jacobin wrote last week that “Our Revolution failed to live up to its potential.” But the Our Revolution that I know is already a mass organization of working people fighting for real change.
For decades, oligarchs like Real Madrid chairman Florentino Pérez have made Spain’s old-age care sector a favored cash cow. Today, the coronavirus deaths caused by their penny-pinching are a grim monument to the failures of privatization.
The national press has fawned over Mayor London Breed’s coronavirus response. But after being unanimously instructed by San Francisco’s city council to move the homeless into the city’s empty hotel rooms, she has inexcusably dragged her feet — putting the homeless and all San Franciscans at serious risk.
Speculation is growing that the scandal-plagued Joe Biden might drop out of the presidential race. That’s extremely unlikely. But if he does, there’s only one alternative: Bernie Sanders.