In 1916, a mass strike led by black labor organizer David Hamilton Jackson upturned power relations in the Danish West Indies. Its success owed partly to support from Denmark’s labor movement — a true labor internationalism as rare then as it is today.
Outgoing Massachusetts Teachers Association president Max Page reflects on a decade of rank-and-file reformers turning a cautious, staff-driven union into a militant, member-led force by striking, winning stronger contracts, and pushing to tax the rich.
Barbara Kopple’s films Harlan County USA and American Dream captured labor struggle as it was happening: on picket lines, inside unions, and under pressure. Decades later, both remain some of the finest labor documentaries ever made.
In France, May Day has long been a day for all workers to stop working. A recent proposal for some businesses to remain open forced unions to defend the idea that French workers keep May Day as a day to themselves.
A group of researchers tracking every strike in America for the past five years write that after a promising increase in strikes and number of strikers in 2022 and 2023, strike activity dropped off significantly in 2024 and remained low in 2025.
Countless influencers and quack positive-thinking gurus tell us that success is all a matter of individual effort. International Workers’ Day reminds us that individuals are happiest when we have others standing alongside us.
Statements far more reprehensible than anything Hasan Piker has said are regularly written and spoken by prominent liberals in respectable outlets. But because war and Islamophobia are acceptable in elite Democratic circles, they don’t raise an eyebrow.
After this war ends, Iranians will carry on their struggle for democracy, but against even steeper odds in a society gutted by US and Israeli bombs, under a regime that will use the horror of this foreign intervention to justify more domestic repression.
The American people are now paying the highest prices for medicines that they paid to help develop. Congress and the president have the power to change this — but in the past few decades, thanks to intense drug industry lobbying, they have refused to.
A platform backed by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos lets day-to-day “investors” become landlords, twice removed, by buying shares in rental homes. It’s the app-ification of investment in the building blocks of social life.
Spain’s Premier Pedro Sánchez has emerged as a sharp critic of Donald Trump. But he's also pushed for a broader realignment of European policy, recognizing the need for new international partnerships after the end of US hegemony.
In Cali, Colombia, where few qualify for bank loans, the predatory “gota a gota” lending industry generates massive profits for criminal organizations. Many of the working poor don’t even know who their lender is — until they miss a payment.