During the Cold War, much of labor officialdom collaborated with the US government to repress labor movements and left-wing forces abroad. The conservatism that enabled this sordid alliance still impacts much of the US labor movement today.
When my coworkers and I were disciplined for wearing pro-Palestine buttons to work, we realized that our supposedly progressive management wasn’t enough to protect our basic rights and freedoms on the job. We needed a union.
Today’s bosses have unparalleled opportunities to monitor workers’ emotions — and punish those workers for expressing anything short of cheeriness.
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.
Don’t mourn the professional-managerial class — organize it.
The tiny nation has discovered the world’s largest per capita oil reserves. What does the bonanza mean for its future?
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.
The “worker-to-worker” organizing model adopted by many of the most dynamic unions and campaigns in the country has enormous promise for revitalizing labor — in large part because it puts workers themselves in the drivers’ seat.
When and where organized labor’s been on the move.
"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.