Subjects Archives: Labor

Council staff make history with biggest strike over equal pay.

On November 22, 1895 Eugene V. Debs stepped outside of the Woodstock Jail in Chicago, where he had been imprisoned for six months. Debs, the President of the American Railway Union, had been one of the leaders of the Pullman Strike of 1894, considered by many to be the first major national strike in American labor history.

“There are two things I will never accept, colonialism and racism. What many people do not realize is that Europe’s wealth is built on five centuries of exploitation of third world peoples, and that there is something like a historical obligation of reparation, of solidarity at least.”

Labour needs to develop a socialist strategy that goes beyond a single election manifesto. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin look at the challenge of state transformation.

Fifteen districts started the school year on strike in Washington state—the latest to ride the West Virginia wave.

At a time when the American population is radicalizing, when popular movements are coalescing around “radical” demands—Medicare for All, the abolition of ICE, tuition-free college, etc.—it can be useful to draw collective inspiration from the Workers’ Bill proposed by the U.S. communist party in 1930.

A group of union leaders, popular economy advocates, Senegalese street vendors, and militants from the Excluded Workers Movement and CTEP (MTE-CTEP) were taken into jail by Argentine police, in a situation marked by a high dose of violence and violation of their human rights Buenos Aires City.

The Social Wealth Fund plan is insidious in the sense that it has the capacity to redirect vast amounts of energy and resources toward a goal presented as “socialist” when in reality it is fundamentally incompatible with socialism. We must bring the discussion out into the open to prevent such seductive ideas from compromising the basic vision and integrity of socialism.

Our global ecological crisis has created an increasing interest in Marx’s theory of metabolic rift as a crucial aspect of capitalism (Foster 2013). To appreciate fully how capitalism creates this rift, it is important to examine the human metabolic relation with nature in general and theoretical terms.

This lack of distinction explains the decline in women’s workforce participation rates. The decline reflects a shift from paid to unpaid work.

In this episode, we speak with Emma Caterine (@emmacaterineDSA), a law graduate and writer with more than a decade of experience working within economic justice, feminist, LGBTQ, and racial justice movements. We talk Democratic Socialists of America, MMT, the advantages of a federal jobs guarantee over a universal basic income, the place for sex work in a jobs guarantee program.

In response to accusations of encouraging “debt trap” diplomacy in Africa, Chinese President Xi Jinping said the announced aid package is not “a scheme to form an exclusive club or bloc against others. Rather it is about greater openness, sharing and mutual benefit.”

Corporate executives have wooed both Democrats and labor union leaders with increasing assertiveness, in a concerted effort to thwart the interracial labor movement that is the only fighting force to ever battle the plutocrats to a draw.

There is a lot of celebrating going on in mainstream policy circles. The economy is said to be running at full steam with the unemployment rate now below 4 percent.

Organized in the face of a crackdown by authorities, the action seeks to strike at the root of the prison-industrial complex.

For the last thirty years the world system has undergone an extreme centralization of power in all its dimensions, local and international, economic and military, social and cultural.

Tom Broadwater, a brother, recently wrote a commentary titled “Democrats’ Immigration Dogma is Damaging African American Communities.” It appeared in the Afro American newspaper and in Newsweek.

Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal is no class warrior.

In the second installment of our subseries Rebel Women, Madeleine Johansson gives her thoughts on the topic of ongoing debate, sex work, and how we on the left should relate to it.

Capitalists profit from the misery of both those who are unemployed and those who are lucky enough to be working full-time but seeing their work hours increase, their benefits diced, their wages cut. This very much describes the state of modern journalism in 2018.