Yesterday, Amazon workers in Italy held the first nationwide strike in the company’s history. Jeff Bezos’s firm has long used subcontracting, temporary hiring, and a maze of contracts to divide its workforce — but unionizing warehouse staff have made common cause with outsourced delivery drivers.
The union loss in Bessemer, Alabama against Amazon was a crushing defeat. It’s a reflection of a disjunction between “laborism,” the intellectual and activist infrastructure supportive of organized labor, and the labor movement itself.
Rich people have enormous carbon footprints. But the fundamental problem with their climate impact isn’t what they consume — it’s that they own the means of production, and it’s extremely profitable for them to pollute.
Catapulted to media attention by its stunts, Extinction Rebellion has wasted its platform on a message of individualized guilt and obedience to the powerful. To avert climate disaster, we need economic transformation, not pointless moralism.
COVID-19 has caused unprecedented disruption to the world economy, shining a harsh light on the frailties of global capitalism. But there won’t be a progressive paradigm shift coming out of the crisis without a dramatic upsurge of collective action.
Capitalist "liberty" is just another word for private tyranny. Workers, not capitalists, should control economic enterprises.
Apple CEO Tim Cook claimed in 2019 that his company’s greatest achievement will be “about health.” But the pandemic has shown that Big Tech’s involvement in health care is all about data collection.
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“Microworkers” are the anonymous digital contract workers whose labor powers the tech giants’ artificial intelligence systems. They’re hyper-exploited — and, like all other workers under capitalism, will continue suffering until they can organize.
Lawmakers and corporate lobbyists stymied recent proposed legislation to protect employees’ jobs when they flee an unsafe workplace — exactly the kind of protection that could have saved the Amazon workers who died at work during tornadoes over the weekend.
When socialists talk about creating a more equal society, we don’t mean a society where everyone has an exactly equal share of everything. We mean a society where power has been equalized by extending democracy into the economy.
Despite their divorce, both Gates billionaires, Bill and Melinda, are backing Nick Kristof’s imperiled gubernatorial run, along with a variety of big-money interests. Yet the mainstream press is offering almost no scrutiny of Kristof’s close ties to the ultrawealthy.
Talk of a great technological replacement suggests that automation is rendering most workers obsolete. But innovation isn’t simply replacing human workers — rather, it’s created a battle over whose interests the new technologies will serve.
Rising poll scores bring Jean-Luc Mélenchon ever closer to making the runoff in April’s presidential election. France Insoumise’s Manon Aubry tells Jacobin how the Left is challenging the neoliberal and far-right stranglehold over the country’s politics.
The establishment of the first Amazon union in the US is a historic breakthrough for organized labor. The successful union drive shows how the Left can best build real grassroots power: by organizing in the workplace.
Many fear that Twitter under Elon Musk will fall to bigots and harassers. Maybe. But instead of arguing over who should be kicked off Twitter, we should ask what it’s designed to do to those who stay on it.
Joe Biden is considering a highly limited, means-tested student debt forgiveness program. But means-testing is a terrible idea that centrist Democrats are still obsessed with — and will pay a heavy political price for.
The only way to stop climate change is to build a mass, working-class movement whose demands both resonate with average people and take on the billionaires who are profiteering from the climate crisis.
This past weekend, 4,000 labor militants gathered near Chicago for the Labor Notes conference. Amazon and Starbucks workers, teachers, Teamsters, Bernie Sanders — Labor Notes is a mosaic that brought the labor and leftist upsurge under one roof.
The United States claims it benevolently promotes democracy over authoritarianism through its international technology policies. In reality, America forces poor countries to let US-based Big Tech companies steal their data.