Subjects Archives: Labor

The seriousness of the situation was confirmed by the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report showing that a record 2.9 percent of the workforce quit their jobs in August, which is equivalent to 4.3 million resignations.

Ten thousand John Deere workers in Iowa, Illinois, and Kansas launched an open-ended strike October 14.

Wittenoom is an abandoned town in the desert north of Perth. Once, it had a population of almost 1,000, making it the biggest town in the Pilbara. Now, it’s been removed from maps and cut off from all essential services, to stop people from visiting.

Healy’s exquisite book applies several recent frameworks of alienation to two groups of workers–IT workers and academics.

Indian peasants and agricultural workers remain in the midst of a country-wide agitation sparked by the proposal of three farm bills that were then signed into law by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party government in September 2020.

Everything changes and yet everything stays the same.

Workers employed in major film and television production houses have complained of abysmal working conditions such as long hours, often exceeding 12 hours a day, low wages and low healthcare contributions from producers.

Many are understandably alarmed about what the September 4th termination of several special federal pandemic unemployment insurance programs will mean for millions of workers.

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.