Wouter van de Klippe is a freelance journalist and writer based in Europe. He is particularly interested in organized labor, social and environmental justice, and social welfare states.
Ever since Amazon arrived in Poland in 2014, the country has been a laboratory for the company’s strategy of pitting workers of different nations against one another. We spoke with Polish shop-floor activists who are organizing Amazon workers for a global fightback.
Today the Australian Labor Party is among the most neoliberal parties in the world. But after World War II, Australian Labor PM Ben Chifley wanted to nationalize the banks. No surprise, the bankers ferociously stopped him.
US labor law is so stacked against workers it allows companies to pack up and leave just to avoid dealing with a unionized workforce. We shouldn’t give employers this nuclear option — it completely undercuts working-class power.
Support for a multiparty system is widespread in the United States. Such a system is crucial to ridding this country of the two-party trap and building a real democratic system. That’s why socialists should support proportional representation in our electoral system.
The fall of the USSR in 1991 left Cuba mired in economic crisis and increasingly vulnerable to hostility from Washington. For the revolution to survive, it had to draw on its own domestic legitimacy — including its independence from the Soviet model.
The labor movement’s iconic inflatable rat has survived a pathetic judicial attempt at extermination. But though Scabby is free, unions remain hamstrung by the oppressive federal prohibition on secondary boycotts encoded in the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act.
From Bob and Doug McKenzie to the Trailer Park Boys, the Canadian hoser is an integral part of the country’s cultural landscape. The hoser is also a working-class emblem, whose uncertain fortune in the face of economic downturns reflects the wider experience of Canadian workers.
The megacorporation Tata has shaped Indian capitalism for 150 years. Despite its best efforts to sustain an image as an ethical company, Tata’s roots in war profiteering and the opium trade, and its sophisticated suppression of worker organizing, is testament to the fact that “ethical capitalism” is only ever a contradiction in terms.
This month, Italian courts jailed fourteen men for their roles in Operation Condor, the US-backed Latin American terror campaign. But many more torturers are living out a peaceful retirement — denying justice to the leftists they brutalized and murdered.
Charter schools don’t improve education outcomes. But they do funnel taxpayer money into the pockets of unscrupulous — often criminal — school operators. It’s a national disgrace that needs to end.
This year, the Canadian TV show Trailer Park Boys turns twenty. The program’s refusal to patronize its marginal, working-class characters was key to its comedic and popular success, and won it a special place in our hearts.
Michael Foot was a giant of Labour Party politics. The attempts by Labour centrists to diminish his legacy after his death only reveal the extent to which his socialism, like that of Jeremy Corbyn, threatened the British establishment.
Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are strengthening their commitment to tech entrepreneurialism as they scale back Canada’s COVID-19 benefits. This is not a road map to recovery; it is a path to austerity and precarity in the workplace.
In more and more of the country Amazon acts like an employer in a company town, sucking up whole communities and shaping public goods and services to fit its profit-making needs.
Two years since millions-strong protests toppled Algeria’s longtime president, June’s regime-organized elections met with a massive popular boycott. For Algerians to really control their lives, the whole regime must go.
Cubans confront a host of problems amid a national health emergency — and the Biden administrative is only adding to punitive sanctions with the intent to make everything worse.
NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar writes in Jacobin about the meaning of the Milwaukee Bucks’ victory this year, and his own Bucks championship in 1971.
With the new Child Tax Credit, two-thirds of people in the US now receive monthly benefit checks. That’s a very good thing — it means delivering poor, working-class, and middle-class people clear material gains while also destigmatizing the welfare state.
This summer has been a cascade of climate disaster. But we shouldn’t assume that ever-worsening floods and heat waves will spur political change — we need a working-class strategy that can excite and win over people to save the planet.
The 1931 Workers’ Olympiad in Vienna was an inspiring example of mass-scale sports, free of corporate influence. These photos from the games show how the workers’ movement promoted collective joy and class pride, even outside the factory gates.