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Jeff Schuhrke is a labor historian and assistant professor at the Harry Van Arsdale Jr School of Labor Studies, SUNY Empire State University. He is the author of Blue-Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade.
As American unions denounce Donald Trump’s deportation of Kilmar Abrego García to El Salvador, it’s worth recalling when US labor used its collective power to resist repression in that country in the 1980s.
The Reagan administration enlisted the AFL-CIO to provide cover for its bloody campaign against the Left in Central America. But progressive forces in US labor took a stand in solidarity with trade unionists facing murderous repression in El Salvador.
For much of its history, the AFL-CIO has enthusiastically backed US foreign policy. During the Cold War, that included actively participating in efforts to suppress left-wing labor movements abroad.
In the 1940s, Soviet and US labor unionists arranged for exchanges between their countries to promote goodwill and help prevent a dangerous rivalry. The largely forgotten effort serves as a reminder of how the Cold War might have been averted.
The growing swell of American unions demanding a cease-fire in Gaza is heartening. But labor will have to take its antiwar commitments further than issuing statements to stop Israel’s wanton slaughter.
The US labor movement has a decades-long history of supporting Israel wholeheartedly, punctuated by moments of pro-Palestine actions by rank-and-file activists. As Israel wages its war on Gaza, those pro-Palestine moments are becoming increasingly common.
While some US unions and many labor activists are calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, most union officials are keeping silent. They’re forgetting the old labor adage: “an injury to one is an injury to all.”
International Workers’ Day traces its roots to the 1886 Haymarket affair, when labor radicals in Chicago were unjustly executed. Ever since, reactionaries have tried to tarnish their legacy — and leftists have honored them as working-class martyrs.
Despite high-profile victories in the 1960s and ’70s, farmworkers in the US have been poorly paid and heavily exploited for generations. They deserve the power of a union.
The union organizing upsurge in the United States has reached Trader Joe’s. Two stores, one in Massachusetts and one in Minneapolis, have unionized. We talked to a Minneapolis worker about why.
The union-busting campaign carried out by Starbucks indicates that the company will not stop until they destroy Starbucks Workers United. The rest of the labor movement has a duty to support the Starbucks union drive — before it’s too late.
US labor law is designed to prevent railroad strikes like the kind that shook America in the past. But the constant cuts to staffing levels and erosion of conditions for rail workers could produce a national rail walkoff by September.
Despite slogging through the difficulties of teaching during a pandemic, graduate workers at the University of Illinois Chicago say they continue to face low pay and disrespect at work. On Monday, they went on strike.
The relationship between American and Mexican trade unions has been characterized both by US labor officials carrying water for US imperialism in Mexico and by militant, democratic cross-border unionism.
Ed Asner was an immensely talented actor. He was also an uncompromising union militant who fought for lower-paid actors and against Ronald Reagan’s murderous interventions in Central America.
The American labor movement’s leadership has long sided with the state of Israel’s war crimes and apartheid over the Palestinian people. That has to change.
Bosses like management at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, where workers are trying to unionize, love to bring up union dues as part of their union-busting. But union organizers shouldn’t shy away from talking about why dues are important: they allow workers to pool the resources needed to fight the boss and win.
The barriers to organizing a general strike in the United States in response to the myriad miseries American workers are facing are massive. But we can’t move toward such a strike without at least putting the possibility on the table and discussing it — something the AFL-CIO has shown no interest in doing.
The United Electrical Workers was once one of America’s mightiest unions. But because many leaders were leftists who challenged corporate power, UE was decimated by McCarthyism. The union managed to survive, though, and UE’s model of militant, democratic unionism is exactly what we need to revive labor in the 21st century.
In 1973, Arab-American workers in Detroit auto plants walked off the job in protest of the UAW’s investment in bonds from the state of Israel. The incident is little-remembered today, but it shows how workers can organize against racism and colonialism — including against the labor movement’s investment in the Israeli occupation of Palestine today.