Subjects Archives: Labor

In this episode, we’re joined by Steven Attewell, Adjunct Professor of Public Policy at the City University of New York’s School of Labor and Urban Studies.

NAFTA had been in effect for just a few months when Ruben Ruiz got a job at the Itapsa factory in Mexico City in the summer of 1994.

The student population today is unrecognisable from that of a generation or more ago, writes Matt Myers. And it is central to any socialist project for the future.

When it comes to the work of social reproduction of another human being, the care of another human cannot be limited by capital’s ticking clock, so these workers put in their own time, or in the case of teachers, also their own money, to provide the best care they can.

It’s become something of a shopworn cliché to say that “for every problem, there’s an opportunity.” However, I submit that this adage might well apply to General Motors’ November 26th announcement that it will be eliminating more than 14,000 jobs and closing seven factories worldwide by the end of next year, including four factories in the U.S. and one in Canada.

Venezuelan grassroots organization Venezuela Libre de Transgenicos / Semillas del Pueblo (Venezuela Free from GMO / Seeds of the People) reports on the third anniversary of the passing of the Seed Law and the efforts driven from below to implement it.

It’s now official: workers around the world are falling behind. The International Labor Organization’s (ILO) latest Global Wage Report finds that, excluding China, real (inflation-adjusted) wages grew at an annual rate of just 1.1% in 2017, down from 1.8% in 2016. That is the slowest pace since 2008.

The first model is a radical critique of all forms of bourgeois right, including employment rights, which are considered to constitute an ideological reflection of the capitalist mode of production, and therefore an inseparable companion of exploitation.

Lithuania is being shaken by an unprecedented teachers strike, which has now entered its fourth week and is causing severe anxiety, distress and panic among the ruling class and its political representatives. Already, Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis has been forced to sack not only the hated Education Minister, Petrauskienė, but also two other Ministers: for Culture, and the Environment.

On trial with other members of the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats in 1849, Karl Marx argued in a Cologne court that their prosecution was based upon “laws which the Crown itself has trampled into the dirt”.

In 1972 feminists from Italy, England, and the United States convened in Padova, Italy, for a two-day conference. Associated with the extra-parliamentary left, anti-colonial struggles, and alternatives to the communist party, these activists composed a declaration for action, the “Statement of the International Feminist Collective.”

A new book argues that words like “innovation” are doing more than telling you who to avoid at parties.

The most significant feature of contemporary capitalism which is of relevance to the world of work is its inability to provide work to a substantial proportion of persons looking for it.

Many people have given up on the idea of government as an instrument of progressive social change, especially the federal government.

Whatever you may think of the multi-billionaire founders of Amazon and Alphabet-Google,⁽¹⁾ there would seem to be one undeniable fact about their companies: they have massively improved productivity. Amazon has an e-commerce system that delivers very efficiently; Google has revolutionised Internet search.

The rise of Donald Trump has brought talk of fascism to the forefront. While comparing U.S. Presidents to Hitler is certainly nothing new–both Obama and W. Bush were regularly characterized as such by their haters–Trump’s emergence on the national political scene comes at a very peculiar moment in U.S. history.

Since the 2016 elections, corporate media narratives about U.S. politics have fixated on the “white working class” as a pivotal demographic, presented as a hardscrabble assortment of disaffected outsiders.

Organizing a union is no easy task in the United States. Although organizing a union is supposed to be a protected right, businesses regularly fire union supporters knowing that they face minimal punishment even if found guilty for their actions. In fact, the rights of all workers, regardless of their interest in unionization, are being whittled down. Simply put, U.S. law doesn’t work for workers.

In this interview we talk to Andrés Ruggeri, anthropologist and researcher who directs the Facultad Abierta programme, dedicated to researching and supporting companies and factories recuperated by their workers. Ruggeri tells us about the history of this movement, the challenges it faces, the relations with recent governments in Argentina, and much more.

Those aren’t my words. The quotation that forms the title of this post is from a recent Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis blog post.