Subjects Archives: Labor

This article discusses Susan Ferguson’s Women and Work and how it advances contemporary debates about social reproduction within and beyond Marxist feminism. In particular, I emphasise its call for avoiding hierarchising struggles against oppression and those against exploitation, and for centring a dual-terrains approach. – Maud Perrier

While workers are continuing to struggle under Covid, corporate lobbyists are converging on Capitol Hill to block proposed pro-labor reforms.

The Supreme People’s Court published a set of labor-related disputes to clarify legal standards of working hours and overtime wages.

The United Nations issued a “code red for humanity” warning earlier this month with over 3,000 pages of scientific documentation saying that the climate crisis has reached a point where we can expect extreme weather including heat waves, flooding and droughts to happen with more frequency and intensity.

If the U.S. wants to be a world leader, it has to match China in investing in knowledge generation for future technology. Why then is the U.S. taking the sanctions route? Sanctions are simpler to implement; building a society that values knowledge is much more difficult. This is the crisis of late capitalism.

This article summarizes the manuscript, “The Two-Employer Problem: Strategic Dilemmas at the Heart of the Tipped Wage Debate,” a co-winner of the 2021 Albert Szymanski-T.R. Young/Critical Sociology Marxist Sociology Graduate Student Paper Award.

According to an Economic Policy Institute report, between 28 and 47 percent of U.S. private sector workers are subject to noncompete agreements.

For any working period—whether it be a day, an hour, or five minutes—part of the period is “necessary labor” and another part is “surplus labor.”

Bourgeois pundits are alarmed by the Chinese government’s latest regulatory changes. A Wall Street Journal headline is typical: “China’s corporate crackdown is just getting started. Signs point to more tumult ahead.”

In the worker-controlled Venezuelan Kellogg factory, you see the workers working diligently to make corn flake and sugary cereals in a new package displaying the Venezuelan flag and the words “Together for Venezuela.”

For years, a toxic culture of rampant sexism has permeated Activision Blizzard, the video game development company behind titles including World of Warcraft and Call of Duty.

Georgina Orellano, secretary-general of the Association of Women Sex Workers of Argentina (AMMAR), says that “the pandemic has highlighted the inequality” in society and deepened the problems faced by sex workers. Sex work, which is not recognized in Argentina, has become more precarious, she says.

A new report from Berkeley is a rare piece of good news for American labor—and a bracing reminder of what real organizing looks like.

Urban crime is the golden child of local media, as recent FAIR coverage (6/21/21) has shown. But as FAIR’s Julie Hollar recently noted, the amount of attention given to a topic does not always reflect the seriousness of the situation.

Contrary to rhetoric from Democrats and Republicans, the U.S. has an economic interest in trade and peace with China

By centering “human capital” and providing more pathways to work and residency for higher-skilled migrants, despite lower-skilled migrant workers having a far greater desire to temporarily migrate and permanently settle, Canada is able to continually reap the benefits of both high-skilled and low-skilled labor without having to socially reproduce either.

Between 30 June and 2 July 2021, the United Nations and other multilateral organisations held the Generation Equality Forum in Paris (France).

In this episode, we’re joined by Rohan Grey (@rohangrey), President of the Modern Money Network, Director of the National Jobs for All Coalition, Research Fellow at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, and JSD student at Cornell Law school. Our conversation is dedicated to Rohan’s current work on the political, economic, and cultural implications of money’s digital future.

Upon reading Sohn-Rethel it becomes clear that his work is important for contemporary debates on ecology, the Marxist critique of science and debates on post-revolutionary societies such as the former Soviet Union.

At a time when seemingly everyone is working more for less, why should idols be any exception?