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Steve Early has been a DSA member for forty-two years, active in the Communications Workers of America even longer, and authored a book called Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Making of an American City, which profiled Jovanka Beckles and other leaders of the Richmond Progressive Alliance.
In May 1970, 4 million students went on strike across the country, shutting down classes at hundreds of colleges, universities, and high schools and demanding an end to the Vietnam War. Fifty years later, their rebellion remains an inspiration, as radical student politics is back on the agenda.
Many national unions still haven’t endorsed in the presidential race. But no other candidate has the same history of walking the picket lines, fighting for worker rights, and fostering union organizing that Bernie Sanders does.
Martin Scorsese’s new film The Irishman continues Hollywood’s obsession with the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. We’re more concerned with what happened to Teamster working conditions under his son, James P. Hoffa.
Republicans and centrist Democrats love to pour money into more and more wars. But when it comes to providing public health care for the soldiers they put in harm’s way, they try to privatize and starve vets’ programs. We have to stop them.
Thirty years ago this summer, 60,000 telephone workers walked off the job in New York and New England — and stayed out for seventeen weeks. Their struggle against NYNEX, a telecom giant, became one of labor’s few big strike victories, during a decade that began with the disastrous defeat of PATCO, the national air traffic controllers union.
When leftists push their ideals on their kids, politics looks more like drudgery than liberation.
Bernie Sanders has a long record of supporting pro-worker policies. Organized labor should back his presidential run.
The troublesome question of aging.
This essay original appeared in MRZine. It is republished here by its author. Steve’s “Beyond the Fields” appears in the Spring 2011 issue of Jacobin.
