Opal Lee is a writer.
Donald Trump is insisting that meatpacking plants stay open, despite companies like Cargill coming under fire for the deplorable workplace conditions that are spreading coronavirus. We spoke to a worker who says Cargill’s carelessness and deceit made a bad situation incalculably worse.
The Federalist‘s top manager Ben Domenech is deeply upset that Matt Bruenig filed charges at the National Labor Relations Board for Domenech’s “joking” anti-union threats against employees. If Domenech didn’t want to get dragged to court, maybe he shouldn’t have broken labor law.
The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a dangerous escalation in tensions between China and the United States. But our allegiance shouldn’t be with either country’s ruling class — it should be with both countries’ workers.
Prominent Democrats and liberal writers lost their minds when the Democratic Socialists of America announced it would not endorse Joe Biden. But why would a socialist organization campaign for a politician who opposes everything that organization stands for?
In this year’s primaries, Bernie Sanders won landslide levels of support from Latinos. Here’s how he did it.
Palestine has been battered for over a century, yet the narrative of a “tragic clash” of two peoples with claims to the same territory still prevails. That framing is wrong — Palestine’s miseries are the product of settler-colonial conquest.
A few weeks ago, we had a democratic-socialist presidential campaign with several million donors and over a thousand-person staff. Today, we have no mass organization to carry on the struggle. We can change that — but only with Bernie’s help.
The power of organized labor won the Occupational Safety and Health Administration 49 years ago today. That victory has saved thousands of lives in workplaces across the country — but we need to think even bigger than regulatory reforms now.
Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, has donated $100 million to food banks during the current crisis, but he won’t even pay his own workers sick pay. Instead of charity, we need rights we can rely on — and as Unite leader Len McCluskey argues, the best way to win them is to organize with our coworkers.
Illinois cannot act to provide relief for its renters struggling under the coronavirus pandemic because of a 1997 rent control ban pushed by the Right. But this could change if its governor, J. B. Pritzker, used his emergency powers to lift that ban and aid the millions of Illinoisans who can’t pay the rent.
People desperately need to go back to work and save what they can of their lives. But Mike Davis argues that a rapid reopening of the economy would only result in unspeakable tragedy for millions.
In recent years, firms like Google and Facebook have used the Global South as a test bed for new and unregulated forms of data collection. Faced with coronavirus, the same mechanisms are being rolled out across the world — with for-profit data collection becoming increasingly central to states’ management of their welfare systems.
As tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs in the coronavirus crisis, the richest Americans saw their wealth rise by hundreds of billions of dollars. It’s not a coincidence.
The idea of human rights was once intimately tied to egalitarianism and socialist politics. By the 1990s, it was used to justify neoliberalism.
Railworkers have been decisive in the resistance to Emmanuel Macron’s dismantling of the French welfare state. These workers’ strength owes to their ability to bring traffic to a standstill — but also to a culture of solidarity built across decades of militant workplace activism.
The coronavirus pandemic is a reminder that as long as they’re making profits, capitalists don’t care if we live or die. But unions, at their best, fight for everyone.
The COVID-19 crisis has hit Australian universities hard, with a largely casualized workforce already at risk of job losses. As rank-and-file union members prepare to fight back, they’re forced to confront a neoliberal rot that set in decades ago.
Mitch McConnell’s suggestion that states should go bankrupt instead of asking for federal assistance was the bloviating of an austerity-minded reactionary. What we need instead is a universal welfare state that refuses to let workers in any state suffer the vagaries of the market.
Donald Trump richly deserves to be condemned for his response to COVID-19. But the catastrophic failures of public policy didn’t start with Trump: this bipartisan disaster has been decades in the making.
People are losing everything — their jobs, their homes, their health care, their savings. Democratic socialists must articulate the pain and uncertainty ordinary people are experiencing during this crisis or the Right will fill the void.