The Best Way to Secure LGBTQ Rights: Unions

Labor’s ability to improve queer workers’ lives stems from its power to raise standards for all workers.

It’s Time for Salting to Make a Comeback

At Starbucks, Amazon, UPS, and many other workplaces, there are enormous opportunities for radicals to organize on shop floors. If you want to rebuild the labor movement, get a job and start organizing with your coworkers.

Is Peet’s the Next Big Coffee Shop Unionization Push?

It’s not just Starbucks anymore: workers at two California Peet’s Coffee stores announced their intention to unionize. The worker-driven model at the heart of Starbucks Workers United is spreading.

The Strike Is Workers’ Sharpest Tool. A Resurgent Labor Movement Must Be Willing to Use It.

We have a rare opportunity to rebuild a fighting labor movement in the United States. To take advantage of it, workers must be armed with battle-tested strategies and tactics — and that means being willing to go on strike.

Labor Isn’t a Special Interest. It Promotes the Common Good.

Decades of data shows that nonworkers, including retirees and students, make up one of labor’s most consistently pro-union constituencies. The movement has more allies than it realizes, and harnessing them could reshape its strategic horizon.

Is This the Labor Upsurge We’ve Been Waiting For?

Every blip in worker struggle raises a question: Is labor finally turning the corner? But our current moment features both pissed-off workers and successful militant union reform movements. Together, the two could turn worker anger into something much bigger.

Unionization Is Starting to Spread Across the Retail Sector

Inspired by the recent wave of union campaigns at Starbucks and Amazon, retail workers at major chains like Target are launching new organizing drives across the United States.

We Are in a Unique Moment of Labor Upsurge That Requires Rethinking the Old Organizing Rules

Amazon and Starbucks workers have upended the old common sense for how to organize unions. Union leaders need to retool their organizing tactics to fit a moment when workers are leading the way.

Right Now Is the Most Exciting Moment to Join the Labor Movement in Decades

This May Day, don’t hang your head for the labor movement’s defeat. US unions are weak, it’s true. But there’s more excitement, more of a spirit of militancy and experimentation, and more hope in today’s labor movement than there has been in a long time.

The Barnes & Noble Union Fight Is Spreading

The union drive at Barnes & Noble has now spread to six of the national bookseller's locations, attempting to organize the bookstore giant on a store-by-store basis. It could be a key front in the fight to unionize the US culture industry.

The NLRB Can’t Punish Employers Strongly Enough

The problem of case backlogs at the National Labor Relations Board goes deeper than budget shortfalls. Without serious penalties for employers who break the law, the board will continue to be hampered by a pileup of charges.

Baristas of the World, Unite

Following on the heels of the union drive at Starbucks, a growing number of campaigns have appeared to organize coffee shops. In Pittsburgh, baristas at Coffee Tree Roasters, a local company with five stores, are unionizing with the UFCW.

Our Current Moment of Increased Labor Organizing Could Become Something Much Bigger

Trying to win progressive change without rebuilding the labor movement is a fool’s errand. That’s why the union victories at Starbucks and Amazon are so promising: the current uptick in labor militancy could become a transformational upsurge.

The First Principle of Union Organizing: Spontaneity Isn’t Enough

The seemingly spontaneous upsurges at companies like Starbucks and Amazon are an inspiring sign of life within the workers’ movement. But spontaneity is nowhere near enough to turn labor’s dismal fortunes around.

Don’t Fall for the Myth of the “Job Creator”

Billionaires like Howard Schultz like to claim that that we should be grateful for all the jobs they create. But the ultrarich don’t create jobs in any meaningful sense — they just reap the rewards of asset ownership and the labor of their workers.

The Window at Starbucks

Undergraduate Worker Unions Are Taking Off

At colleges around the US, undergraduate workers are unionizing. The growing movement not only builds worker power on campuses but can help make university students into lifelong trade unionists.

Democrats Are Lining Restaurant Owners’ Pockets — and Abandoning Restaurant Workers

A $42 billion bailout for the restaurant industry is advancing in Congress. It contains zero substantive relief measures for restaurant workers.

Trader Joe’s Workers Are Unionizing — and the Company Is Union Busting

Two Trader Joe’s stores have now unionized, raising the question of whether the chain could be the next Starbucks. But the company may at least be following in Starbucks’s footsteps in one way — by engaging in illegal union busting.

Bernie Sanders Is About to Publicly Roast Capitalists in Front of the Nation

Bernie Sanders will soon use his new role as chair of a key Senate committee to put CEOs in the hot seat. Progressive elected officials should look to Sanders for how to keep public attention laser-focused on the crimes of the executive class.