Many explanations of the United Auto Workers’ recent loss at Mercedes in Alabama don’t hold up under scrutiny. To understand the challenges the UAW ran into, we need a historical perspective on attempts to organize in the US South.
The Biden administration has proposed a desperately needed new heat standard to protect workers from scorching temperatures. Expect business groups to oppose it.
No one believed in and embodied the labor movement’s transformative power more than organizer, strategist, and writer Jane McAlevey.
Since the 1800s, from Eugene Debs to the Milwaukee “sewer socialists,” the US socialist movement has been especially vibrant in the Midwest — and continues to shape American heartland politics today.
The New York City comptroller’s office has launched a useful new tool for the public: a database detailing the city’s worst bosses and their various labor abuses, along with an accompanying “Employer Wall of Shame.”
Workers at Ultium’s Spring Hill electric vehicle plant, a joint venture between General Motors and LG Energy Solution of Korea, have unionized. It’s the latest case of the UAW’s Big Three strike bearing fruit.
This summer, workers at Bernheimer Architecture in New York City became the first private sector architects in the US to ratify a union contract. An architect at the firm explains their road to a first collective bargaining agreement.
The labor movement has a special responsibility to confront artificial intelligence’s imposition on workers: without unions, bosses have carte blanche to use AI to undercut workers at every level.
Donald Trump will do his best to undermine unions. But the labor movement still has momentum on its side and numerous opportunities to seize. Trump’s presidency has to be a time for labor action, not despair.
The use of customer reviews to evaluate workers is rising across the service sector. Once you get past the shiny rhetoric of consumer empowerment, it’s a new variation on an old story: enlisting customers on the side of management to help discipline and exploit workers.
"Salting" built the early American labor movement -- and it can revive it today.
In the labor movement, we are only as strong as the weakest among us. Revoking the right to abortion undercuts much of the workforce’s bargaining power — which means reproductive freedom is a cause the entire labor movement must champion.
Critics of Israel’s merciless war on Gaza are facing threats of government prosecution and blacklists or firings. In this neo-McCarthyist environment, anything pro-Palestine is being made to carry the whiff of bigotry or even incitement to violence.
Even as union density has declined, unions have spent little on organizing while amassing vast war chests. But the UAW and Workers United are showing that spending big on strikes and organizing pays off.
Why is there so much misery in a world of plenty? Why do private profit and wealth come before human needs and lives? Marxism has answers to these questions — answers that are actually easy to understand.
The billionaire owners of the Buffalo Bills, Terry and Kim Pegula, have struck a deal to collect $850 million in public money for a new stadium. It’s a scam we’ve seen time and time again — one that enriches a team’s owners at the expense of local residents.
A reborn workers’ movement needs both organized workplace militancy and left-wing politicians that back them. Sunday’s Staten Island Amazon rallies — attended by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other elected officials — featured both.
Jon Melrod was part of a wave of student radicals who took jobs in factories in the 1970s. He spoke to Jacobin about life in working-class Wisconsin, becoming a workplace leader, and how to merge shop-floor fights with a broader left politics.
Today’s union-busters owe much to the bosses of the Progressive Era, who refused to recognize unions and fired labor organizers. Employers have never been “enlightened,” instead fighting tooth and nail to maintain their dictatorial powers.
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