Own Your Bad

CUNY Is the People’s University. Austerity Is Killing It.

The City University of New York is the crown jewel of the city’s once-robust welfare state, a vital resource for working-class New Yorkers. Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul are starving it.

Big Pharma Is Obscenely Jacking Up the Prices of Publicly Funded COVID Vaccines

With pharma giant Moderna planning to quintuple the price it charges for its COVID vaccines — developed using taxpayer dollars — the case for nationalizing an out-of-control drug industry has never been stronger.

There’s No Such Thing as a “Self-Made Man”

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.

France Won’t Accept Emmanuel Macron’s Attack on Pensions

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.

Never Forget the Victims of Grenfell

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.

You Can Thank George W. Bush’s War on Terror for Donald Trump

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.

A New Worker Upsurge in Pro Golf, Brought to You by Saudi Arabia

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.

Tyre Nichols’s Death Is What Happens When You Get “Tough on Crime”

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.

A Gruesome Bill Asks Prisoners to Give Up Organs to Get Out a Few Months Early

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.

Canada’s Health Care Crisis Is in Large Part a Labor Crisis

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.

US Voting Patterns Are Shifting. But It’s Not Simply “Class Dealignment.”

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.

British Universities Keep Squeezing Faculty and Students Tighter and Tighter

The UK’s neoliberal university system is pushing more and more faculty into precarious, low-paid positions while charging students ever more exorbitant fees.

Tenure-Track Faculty Are a Key Piece of the Academic Labor Puzzle

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.

Restaurant Industry Execs Are Very Worried About Food Service Workers Unionizing

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.

Does the GOP Want a Government Default So It Can Kill Social Security?

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.

A Right-Wing Think Tank Just Named AMLO “Tyrant of the Year.” It’s Absurd.

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.

“Ethical Consumption” Used to Mean Something More Than Feeling Smug About Your Purchases

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.

Austerity Is to Blame for the UK’s Coming Recession

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.

A. Philip Randolph Was Once “the Most Dangerous Negro in America”

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.