William G. Martin teaches at SUNY-Binghamton and is co-author of After Prisons? Freedom, Decarceration, and Justice Disinvestment (2016) and a founding member of Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier; he covers local justice matters at www.justtalk.blog
Socialist filmmaker Ken Loach has released his final movie, about Syrian refugees finding their feet in an English working-class community. It makes it all the more grotesque that Loach’s political foes are trying to present him as a dangerous bigot.
The Big Three automakers have been deploying scabs against the UAW strike. In the US, we often take the practice for granted — but in the Canadian provinces of Quebec and British Columbia, replacement labor is banned. We should make scabs illegal here too.
The PRO Act contains some of the most significant changes to labor law in decades. But with genuine shortcomings, including no “card check,” the legislation should be seen as an important part of a broader suite of pro-labor reforms.
Poet Linton Kwesi Johnson calls his verse a “cultural weapon in the black liberation struggle.” For half a century, his work has provided a peerless record of black British experience — offering a vital lesson in how oppression fuels the flame of defiance.
Pakistan’s government has imprisoned former PM Imran Khan and called elections for early next year. The turmoil since Khan’s ouster, perhaps the most dramatic crisis in three already-turbulent decades, is symptomatic of deeper political-economic woes.
According to a bombshell new report, the federal government is losing as much as $140 billion per year by subsidizing Medicare Advantage, the privatized insurance scheme managing health care for seniors.
US labor law gives employers carte blanche to replace striking workers with scabs, like the Big Three automakers are doing against the UAW right now. But history shows that workers can create their own “law” of the workplace through a culture of solidarity.
Kevin McCarthy’s ouster as House speaker shows just how hopelessly divided the Republican Party is. But divided doesn’t mean harmless — the hard right can still inflict pointless suffering on the millions of people who depend on government services.
Joe Biden’s newly unveiled American Climate Corps is set to provide green jobs training to just 20,000 people. It falls far short of the ambitious public jobs program the Left has long demanded.
Starbucks Workers United has not yet asked supporters to stop frequenting Starbucks locations. But unionized workers have been ramping up customer solidarity organizing, potentially laying the groundwork for a Starbucks boycott.
Irish liberals are mounting a loud campaign for the state to abandon its neutrality and join NATO. Their agenda has minimal public support — and ignores Ireland’s potential to do good in the world as a nonaligned state.
Laphonza Butler, who was just sworn in to fill Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat, originally hailed from the labor movement. But her career has taken a sharp pro-corporate turn, including a stint acting on behalf of Uber against gig workers in California.
In the face of a hostile conservative elite, radical democratization is Guatemalan president-elect Bernardo Arévalo’s best hope to both tackle corruption and revive the country’s “democratic spring.”
The ongoing turmoil in Haiti has been exacerbated by US meddling. There’s a very good chance that the foreign intervention announced yesterday by the United Nations will make things worse.
A new book makes the supposedly brave claim that two-parent families are good, and that unmarried poor people are miring themselves in poverty. But what upper-class people practice is not just “marriage” — it’s “marriage to upper-class people.”
The UAW’s “stand-up” strike strategy, which targets portions of the Big Three simultaneously, was a gamble. But the approach has worked so far, allowing the union to gradually escalate pressure on companies while empowering rank-and-file workers.
Tomorrow, 75,000 health care workers are set to strike at hundreds of Kaiser facilities across several states in the largest such strike in US history. Their primary grievance is low staffing levels, which unions say are hurting patients and workers alike.
Gavin Newsom is governor of deep-blue California, so he doesn’t have the excuse that Republicans are torpedoing his progressive aims. Yet he’s still selling out workers — including, this week, by killing unemployment insurance for striking workers.
In his sixties and seventies, the balladeer Scott Walker swerved into making some of the most aggressive, complex, and political music of our time.
Will average entertainment workers be able to eke out a living in an industry awash in cash, or will studio executives use new tech like AI to gobble it all up?