- Sabotage as a Tool of Solidarity (12/5/2024) - Striking waiters spent a week in January 1913 throwing fistfuls of asafetida in the fancy dining rooms of New York City hotels. The spice, commonly used a pinchful at a time in Indian cuisine to replace entire onions, has a powerfully fetid odor and cleared most dining rooms (save for a few customers, the New-York Tribune joked, who were “suffering from severe colds”). The workers were on strike since New Year’s Eve – their second city-wide walkout in six months – and the playful… …
- The Right Believes It Has the Supreme Court Votes to Entirely Overturn Labor Law (10/22/2024) - The foundational 1935 labor law protecting workers is unconstitutional, according to major corporations and right-wing zealots who believe they have enough votes on the Supreme Court to overturn it. In the latest sign that anti-union forces will doggedly press the matter, a federal judge for the Northern District of Texas enjoined the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) from processing any allegations of employer violations of workers’ rights. The National Review hailed the decision as “A Welcome Blow to the NLRB.” This is after Elon… …
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- Misjudging Labor (8/10/2024) - On June 13 the Supreme Court once again sided with a multibillion-dollar corporation over its workers. The case of Starbucks Corp. v. McKinney concerns seven employees, now known as the Memphis Seven, whom Starbucks fired in February 2022 as they tried to unionize their store in Tennessee. (Because federal law prohibits employers from retaliating against organizing, the company naturally claims they were let go for violating workplace policies.) The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the agency tasked with guaranteeing workers’… …
- Independent Unions Can Help Break Through the Economic Crisis and Labor’s Paralysis (8/20/2022) - In a period of extreme social and economic crises, when the major labor unions have reduced their organizing programs to a fraction of what they once were and the courts stand athwart any effort to protect workers’ interests, scrappy new independent unions raise hope against hope that maybe — just maybe — workers can fight back and win. I’m writing, of course, about the early 1930s. A newly published book finds some surprising parallels between… …
- 15 Years Ago, Mad Men Quietly Began Its Engagement With Leftist Ideas (7/4/2022) - The prestige drama Mad Men, which ran for seven seasons, beginning fifteen years ago this month, received plenty of awards and close readings from mainstream critics. The Left press largely slept on it, which is a shame: the series was not only very funny and poignant and offered viewers a lot to chew on about the changing politics and gender roles of the 1960s, but seemed to draw direct inspiration from socialist thought. Series creator… …
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- The Amazon Union Campaign Won By Following the Lead of Workers (4/4/2022) - Jeff Bezos has been brought back down to Earth. No boss is invincible. The workers at Staten Island’s JFK8 Amazon fulfillment center proved it by beating the massively rich and powerful corporation 2,654 to 2,131 in a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election on April 1. Meanwhile, a rerun election campaign by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) at Amazon’s Bessemer, Ala. facility remains too close to call when challenged ballots are considered. That the workers in Staten Island organized themselves into… …
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- Happy Striketober. Let’s Restore the Legal Right to Strike. (10/20/2021) - The United States is experiencing a wave of worker militancy and a White House administration that actually wants to take concrete actions to defend and grow labor unions. That strange sensation you’re feeling is optimism about labor’s prospects, reflected in the giddiness of #Striketober. Let’s take this opportunity to restore the legal right to strike. A moment in which tens of thousands of workers are on strike — at John Deere, at Kellogg’s, at Warrior Met Coal—might seem like a strange time to talk about a “right”… …
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- What we owe gig workers (5/28/2021) - Labor advocates and allies in Albany are feuding over a draft bill that aims to grant some union rights to precarious workers who toil at irregular hours and less regular wages for app-based “gig” employers like Uber and Lyft. This family feud is all the more frustrating because there’s a perfectly reasonable New Deal-era state law still on the books for when workers slip through the cracks of a patchwork of worker protections and fissured… …
- “The Amazon Workers in Bessemer Would Already Have Their Union If We Had the PRO Act” (5/6/2021) - The April union election loss at an Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama has been treated in the media as a signal event for the labor movement in the Biden era. But what exactly it signaled remains subject to debate. Kim Kelly is a freelance writer who covered the Amazon election on the ground for More Perfect Union. Shaun Richman, program director at SUNY’s labor center, previously directed the American Federation of Teachers’ charter school organizing division. Here… …
- A Brief History of the U.S. Government’s Targeting of Left-Wing Immigrants (9/3/2020) - On September 8, 1947, federal agents walked into the midtown Manhattan office of the Hotel, Restaurant & Club Employees & Bartenders Union Local 6 and arrested its president for being an “undesirable alien.” Michael J. Obermeier had been organizing hotel workers into a succession of scrappy independent unions since he arrived in New York as a German immigrant around the time of the first World War. By the time of his arrest, he led 27,000… …
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