Ryan Switzer is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stockholm University. He researches right-wing politics in welfare states.
An NLRB decision delivered late last month substantially lowers the legal hurdles to union recognition. But using that opening will require unions to build strong cultures of shop-floor solidarity in the face of employer intimidation.
The new HBO docuseries Telemarketers is a wonderfully weird trip through a scammer call center that swindled money for police and lined the pockets of a clutch of entrepreneurial creeps. You should watch it right away.
Howard Buffett, son of multibillionaire Warren Buffett, has long dominated the social and political life of the central Illinois town of Decatur. It’s a case study in how extreme wealth hollows out democracy.
The town of Rugeley, England, once boasted a thriving, unionized coal industry that underpinned the community. Today it is the site of a hyperexploitative Amazon warehouse — typifying the effects of deindustrialization and union decline across the UK.
As Slovakia heads toward a snap election, former prime minister Robert Fico is surging in polls. His Smer party has a record of defending welfare spending — but its scandals and nationalist rhetoric make it hard for many left-wingers to support.
Interest rate hikes have brought Canada’s cost-of-living crisis to a fever pitch. And while workers are feeling the squeeze, energy corporations are reaping superprofits.
MLK regarded progressive unions as bulwarks of the civil rights movement. In this rousing 1962 speech to the National Maritime Union, he linked the democratic struggles of workers and black people and ended by quoting the “beautiful words” of Eugene Debs.
Gen Z and Millennial workers overwhelmingly support unions, and they’re at the forefront of the current organizing upsurge. Labor can take advantage of this opening — if union leaders get off the sidelines and devote massive resources to new organizing.
Contract negotiations are ongoing between the United Auto Workers and the Big Three automakers — Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis. Last month, 500 UAW members at the Ford plant in Louisville, Kentucky, held rallies in preparation for a potential strike.
Presidential candidates usually write memoirs before running. Vivek Ramaswamy’s Capitalist Punishment: How Wall Street is Using Your Money to Create a Country You Didn’t Vote For is something different — a confused and paranoid attack on “woke capitalism.”
We have seen calls to consider whether it is moral to allow billionaires to exist. But the real question is whether our species can survive the billionaire.
The only way to curb the current inflation in the UK without imposing unbearable costs on workers is to tax corporate profits and wealth and incomes derived from those profits. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party refuses to do so.
The housing crisis will never end without levying forceful taxes against real estate speculators and investors. A recent report outlines the necessary actions to impose taxes that can actually narrow the wealth gap and alleviate the housing emergency.
In an address to union workers ahead of Labor Day, Bernie Sanders says that unprecedented corporate greed demands an unprecedented worker response. We reprint his remarks here.
Two University of California union organizers argue the keys to their union pulling off the largest strike of 2022 were simple: an emphasis on majority participation, democratic decision-making, and building a representative structure across the UC system.
Drugmakers are up in arms over a new program allowing Medicare to negotiate prices on some drugs. The real scandal, of course, is the absurd prices the companies set for these drugs’ sale in the United States, when they are sold for so much less elsewhere.
Twelve years after the Fukushima disaster, Japanese authorities have started pumping wastewater from the plant into the ocean. They insist there’s no danger to public health, but Japan’s neighbors are up in arms about the controversial plan.
President Joe Biden has proclaimed a break with the economic orthodoxy of recent decades in favor of what he calls “Bidenomics.” But how real is Biden’s break with neoliberalism?
The contract that Teamsters just won at UPS isn’t perfect, and we should keep broader strategic goals in mind when evaluating union settlements. But we can’t lose sight of the fact that this is the best UPS contract ever negotiated.
Socialists have demonstrated the tactical utility of running on the Democratic Party ballot line. But making our peace with the party would be a mistake — to accomplish our goals, independent political organization and identity is indispensable.