Just months after emergency room staff went on strike to protest their lack of resources, Paris’s hospitals are having to skimp on masks and thermometers. We spoke to frontline health workers about how they’re coping with the pandemic — and how years of underinvestment is making their job harder.
Air pollution in cities like Sofia leads to thousands of deaths every year. While media blame the crisis on consumer habits, the real problem is decades of real estate speculation and unplanned capitalist development.
Following cataclysmic bushfires, Sydney has spent the last fortnight choked by poisonous smoke. While Prime Minister Scott Morrison pretends all is normal, construction and dock workers have refused to put business as usual above their health, and are walking off the job.
Just in the last week, the Hungarian government has banned gender reassignment, legislated jail terms for fake news, and put government stooges in control of theaters. Viktor Orbán’s administration has done all this in the name of the response to coronavirus — exploiting its emergency powers to silence dissent and demonize minorities.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a change of priorities, as states buy up masks and ventilators regardless of the cost. Basing economic decisions on human need, not our ability to pay, imposes a principle of equality — allowing us collectively to decide what kinds of production we really need.
The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a dangerous escalation in tensions between China and the United States. But our allegiance shouldn’t be with either country’s ruling class — it should be with both countries' workers.
The first major general strike in the United States coincided with the last major pandemic. Here’s the full story.
Photos of Eastern Europeans flown West to pick strawberries despite the lockdown has focused attention on the plight of the EU’s migrant farm laborers. But as some of these workers told Jacobin, traveling across Europe to make ends meet isn’t new — it’s just much more dangerous now.
Australia’s employers and federal government have failed to halt COVID-19, while the country’s public health system and union movement have stepped up. The Australian labor movement now has an historic opportunity to push for an alternative to neoliberalism.
Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth captures the revolutionary possibilities of decolonization. Yet the book has been marred by a misreading that ignores Fanon’s socialism and class analysis, and turns the great thinker into a prophet of violence.
Working from home has obvious benefits, which is why so many people want to keep doing it after the pandemic is over. But the outward appeal of remote work masks serious downsides for workers. We ignore them at our peril.
Governments around the world have partnered with tech companies to battle the COVID-19 pandemic. But their high-tech solutions haven’t saved lives — they’ve simply lined the pockets of Big Tech.
Economic data doesn’t suggest that the US economy is in a recession, but Americans’ on-the-ground experiences tell a different story. Extreme income inequality can explain the discrepancy between the economic data and the real-world belt tightening.
Cuba is caricatured by the Right as a totalitarian hellhole. But its response to the coronavirus pandemic — from sending doctors to other countries to pioneering anti-viral treatments to converting factories into mask-making machines — is putting other countries, even rich countries, to shame.
On Monday, Italy began to ease COVID-19 restrictions, with more than 4 million returning to work. But some, like delivery workers, never stopped working — nor organizing for labor rights in an industry deemed "essential" and putting workers at serious health risk.
As the climate crisis intensifies, workers are being forced to work amid noxious wildfire smoke and in dangerously high temperatures. But workers at UPS and elsewhere are organizing to demand health and safety precautions from their employers.
Restoring big ideas.
The fetishization of work feeds the politics of resentment. It's time to instead embrace the language of economic and social rights.