Alex N. Press is a staff writer at Jacobin who covers labor organizing.
Hundreds of workers are on strike at the Frito-Lay plant in Topeka, Kansas. Many of them are working 12-hour days, seven days a week, and some haven’t had a day off in five months — conditions that are literally killing them.
FDR’s Federal Writers’ Project employed thousands of out-of-work writers to produce guidebooks, compile local histories, and collect stories of the country at a moment of turmoil. We need an equivalent program today.
It’s been a year since Amazon fired Chris Smalls for organizing a rally to protest COVID-19 conditions. Now, he’s trying to unionize his former warehouse, and he won’t stop until there’s worker justice at Amazon.
When workers at Trader Joe’s flagship location collectively organized to challenge their pandemic-era treatment by the company, management responded by interrogating them. We spoke to a worker who filed a complaint with the NLRB over the crackdown.
In his final letter to shareholders as Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos offers a novel — and profoundly disturbing — conception of value creation: a handful of visionaries are the sole source of all “real value.” This aristocracy mercifully blesses customers, clients, and even Amazon workers with social goods.
Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show tells the story of one of the most compelling and successful social movements of the past century, ACT UP. We talked to Schulman about the “New York Crimes,” the messy joy of political commitment, and how ACT UP changed history.
Amazon calls its annual Prime Day a “holiday” — but it’s pure misery for the hundreds of thousands of workers tasked with fulfilling orders.
For weeks, pro-Palestine protesters physically prevented the unloading of Israeli-operated cargo that had entered the Port of Seattle. It finally took a violent crackdown by Seattle police to get the ship unloaded.
In response to calls for a boycott of Israel from the Palestinian labor movement, longshore workers in Oakland, California, last week refused to unload cargo from an Israeli shipping operator.
The AFL-CIO’s new report on police reform doesn’t come anywhere close to what’s needed. Written largely from the perspective of police officers, it rejects calls to defund the police, embracing the failed approach of trying to weed out bad apples.
A new report coauthored by labor analyst Jane McAlevey presents overwhelming evidence that democratic unionism that puts workers at the center of collective bargaining wins strong contracts. Just as important, such unionism also has a transformational effect on workers’ consciousness.
After the “socialist”-branded No Evil Foods busted its workers’ union last year, the company settled with two former employees for $40,000. But those workers still aren’t satisfied — and the private-equity backed company is as fiercely opposed to worker organizing as ever.
Long working hours kill more than 700,000 people per year, even as millions are unable to find enough work to survive. The irrationality of capitalism has a human price.
Chipotle says it is raising its starting wage to $11 an hour. It’s not enough for many workers who say the company’s business model relies on understaffing and overwork, leaving them stressed and with little choice but to cut corners on food safety.
Jay Carney went from being Barack Obama’s press secretary to being Amazon’s top flack. But PR is only part of his job — his larger mission is to help Amazon ruthlessly exploit its workforce so it can expand endlessly.
Chipotle’s contempt for the lives of its workers is appalling, even by fast-food standards. But there’s finally some good news: New York City is suing the fast-casual chain for nearly half a billion dollars, for 600,000 separate violations of workers’ rights.
At Rutgers University, unions have banded together to advance work-sharing as an alternative to the administration’s demands for massive job cuts. The approach has been an engine of solidarity between different groups of workers that has helped cut through the zero-sum logic of austerity.
In his first 100 days as president, Joe Biden has proven unusually willing to associate his administration with the labor movement’s agenda. Unions have a greater opening to win an expansive pro-worker agenda than they have in decades. But we haven’t seen real change yet.
New York University’s finances are flush, yet the administration has stonewalled grad workers on wages and other demands, including limiting New York police officers’ access to campus buildings. Now, the thousands-strong union is on strike.
Embracing a tactical innovation originally pioneered by ISIS, the Republican Party is pushing bills that would empower motorists to run over protesters.