Subjects Archives: Labor

Alexandra Day reviews Silvia Federici’s seminal work, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.

Indonesia’s trade unions and social movements are taking to the streets against anti-worker legislation.

Hundreds of thousands of workers and students in Indonesia have taken to the streets in a powerful wave of strikes and demonstrations opposing the enactment of a new set of laws that would dramatically weaken the rights of the working class and environmental protections.

For 52 years—from 1936 to 1988—the Democratic Party pledged support for the achievement of full or maximum employment.

We need strong unions, all of us. Tragically, even during the pandemic, businesses continue to aggressively resist worker attempts at unionization. And recent decisions by the NLRB only add to worker difficulties.

At a time when unemployment is skyrocketing in the U.S. and millions of out-of-work Americans have been abandoned by the federal government, it may be of interest to consider how an earlier generation responded to an even greater crisis, the Great Depression (1929-1936).

The current economic crisis has hit workers hard. Unemployment rates remain high, with total weekly initial claims for unemployment insurance benefits continuing to grow.

The number of continued claims for unemployment compensation, while below its peak, rose from the previous week and was more than 29 million American workers—a figure that includes workers receiving Pandemic Unemployment Assistance.

The ruling class always tries to divide the working class. We must make certain that the working class is not divided internally and we can draw on the past to find examples of working-class organizations that have actively worked to generate a cohesive and class-conscious membership.

Mary Filippo began in 2004 to audit economics classes in the hope that she could “learn something about globalization. Does it really help people in developing countries? What are its downsides?” She did not learn these things.

The U.S. economy is undergoing a major transformation largely driven by the coronavirus pandemic. One hallmark of that transformation is the explosion in what is called “remote” work.

The American economy gained 1.8 million jobs last month, even as the coronavirus surged in many parts of the country and newly reintroduced restrictions caused some businesses to close for a second time.

All told, 54.1 million American workers have filed initial unemployment claims during the past nineteen weeks.

World leaders like Trump and Johnson trying to get back to business as usual while the virus continues to spread are deliberately sacrificing public health, writes John Clarke.

Mikael Lyngaas argues that post-work theorists ranging from Bob Black to Srnicek and Williams are utopian socialism for the current era.

Unemployment insurance laws were developed prior to the widespread use of contingent faculty, and were designed to prevent K-12 teachers and full-time college professors from collecting unemployment during scheduled term breaks and summer vacations when they weren’t teaching. In nearly all states, these laws are being used to prevent adjuncts, who have since become the majority of professors, from collecting compensation when they are unemployed. This situation is exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lear Corporation—one of the world’s largest auto parts manufacturers—rose to position 148 on Fortune magazine’s famous list of the 500 largest firms in 2018. It operates with roughly 148,000 workers spread across 261 locations.

The 2270-strong Productive Workers’ Army has recuperated 14 state-run firms that had been run into the ground.

Yesterday morning, the U.S. Department of Labor (pdf) reported that, during the week ending last Saturday, another 1.3 million American workers filed initial claims for unemployment compensation. That’s on top of the 48.7 million workers who were laid off during the preceding fifteen weeks.

Today’s jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows two months in a row of payroll employment gains, an increase in jobs of 4.8 million in June on top of 2.7 million in May. But, because so many jobs were lost in March and April, we are still 14.7 million jobs below where we were in February, before the pandemic spread.