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Paul Prescod is an organizer with Teamsters for a Democratic Union and Jacobin contributing editor.
Thinking about racism as some kind of existential “original sin” that will always be with us no matter what we do, no matter what efforts we undertake to fight it, is a political dead end. Through organizing, we have struck blows against racism in the past — we can do so again today.
As the financial crisis worsens, public-sector employment is coming under heavy fire — for black people in particular. Fighting budget cuts and layoffs in public-sector jobs like the post office and public transit must be an essential piece of the fight for black lives.
With the push to reopen public schools amid a still-raging pandemic, many teachers are sounding the alarm. We spoke with one Philadelphia high school teacher who has been organizing his coworkers — and the end result may be a massive strike.
Unemployment in the US is skyrocketing, with the Federal Reserve predicting a long-term unemployment rate of 10 percent. Creating quality jobs for all who want it should be the chief concern of the federal government, not the bogeyman of inflation.
As the Left attempts to chart a new course in the wake of the Bernie Sanders campaign, there’s no better time to learn from America’s most underrated socialist, labor leader, and civil rights legend, A. Philip Randolph.
Joe Biden has been touting black capitalism as part of the path to racial equality. The strategy remains as futile today as when Richard Nixon pushed it fifty years ago.
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.
Martin Luther King Jr died supporting striking black sanitation workers in the South. Less than a decade later, a black Atlanta mayor and King’s own father were attacking that same group of workers and breaking their strike. Black urban governance is meaningless without a commitment to strengthening the public sector and rejecting the logic of austerity.
Both Richard Nixon and Donald Trump have made cynical but shrewdly strategic appeals to building trades unions and their members. The Left needs a plan to win those workers back.
The Root’s laughable rankings of the Democratic candidates on their approach to black issues — assembled by an anonymous panel of experts — show just how out of touch many pundits are with the actually existing black electorate.
Our conceptions of black politics today are often monolithic and juxtaposed as separate from or even against democratic-socialist politics. But 75 years ago, black leaders and activists shared a broad consensus around the importance of the labor movement and multiracial class organizing for black liberation.
Donald Trump’s bait and switch with American workers is his greatest fraud of all. While uttering meaningless platitudes about fighting for workers, he is setting back the labor movement in ways that previous administrations could never do.
Philadelphia. Yes, we’ve booed Santa Claus. But we’ve also had an incredibly rich history of labor militancy.
The United States Postal Service is a crucial institution for black workers in America. That’s why Bernie Sanders’s strong support for defending and expanding the USPS is a key racial justice issue.
For black meatpacking workers, multiracial class politics was the path to economic and social advancement.
In 1970, postal workers went on strike and provoked a national crisis for the United States government. Their rebellion holds lessons for labor today.