Labor Movement

As the Ohio train derailment has exposed the dark repercussions of ignoring union strikes or worker-led movements, it’s important to re-examine the relationships between center-right government and labor movements around the world. …

This is my annual roundup of labor data on union membership, elections and strikes. How is the U.S. labor movement doing? At the beginning of each year a bunch of annual U.S. union data is released, and this is a good time to see what it tells us about how…

Industrial capitalism developed during the 18th and 19th centuries. By 1850 there was a new social force: industrial labor. And there was an industrial labor movement. Some of its adherents espoused socialism. By 1935 a whole section of the capitalist power elite was frightened. Socialism was a growing force worldwide…

The rise of data-centric technologies is an opportunity for the labor and racial justice movements to build new bridges. — Although the labor and racial justice movements have overlapping goals, their work has often been siloed. But with data-centric technologies increasingly impacting both movements, there are opportunities for them to build new bridges. With this in mind, over the past year, Data & Society’s Labor Futures team gathered an interdisciplinary…

With all the discussion, organizing, and community building happening in the midst of the ongoing strike against the University of California (UC), tensions are also rising and antagonistic behaviors and language are becoming common-place. This is not an attempt to de-escalate. This is not an attempt to minimize the efforts…

“They treat you like you’re nothing. Like cockroaches.” — By Emily Jankairam This article is reprinted with permission from In These Times magazine. O rganic convenience foods brand Amy’s Kitchen maintains a carefully constructed image of ethical consumption and saving the planet, one vegan frozen burrito at a time. …

Some thoughts on how unions need to step up in an era of tremendous interest in organizing. A few recent articles highlighted for me a particular and serious problem unions have responding to the huge need for organizing right now. Workers in Michigan recently organized the first union at a…

Attentive obsessives will have noticed that I didn’t post anything last week. It’s not that I didn’t write anything. It’s not that I was enjoying the long weekend, to the extent that I could while coping with the heatwave that made my region of California a triple-digit hellscape, and couldn’t…

By Victor Narro For this Labor Day, we have tremendous victories to celebrate. All throughout the country today, workers are rising up for economic justice. We have seen a groundswell in the number of workers, especially young workers, in the fight to organize a union. In many cities and states, unions, worker centers…