Subjects Archives: Labor

It seems like workers and their unions are in the news more than ever lately. Starbucks baristas, Amazon warehouse workers, John Deere strikers, and even New York Times tech workers, who just unionized, have all starred in the recent swell of labor coverage.

The twin phenomena associated with contemporary globalisation, of migration of capital from the metropolis to parts of the third world, and of migration of labour from the erstwhile second world to the metropolis, have the effect of weakening the working class movement everywhere.

Towards the end of the first chapter of Das Kapital, after having established the validity of the labor theory of value, Marx has a section on the “Fetishism of Commodities”.

First published in January 1972, Working is a baggy collection of over seven-hundred and sixty pages, most devoted to the reflections of ordinary Americans about their economic lives. From the Terkel archive, it’s clear that his interest in work was long standing and went well beyond the USA.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) job report offered some surprises, especially in light of dire predictions about the Omicron crisis. At first glance the impact seemed slight.

On Wednesday, February 9, teachers across Puerto Rico called for a national strike to protest the government and the Fiscal Control Board’s (FCB) cutting of wages and pensions.

The product of pedagogical labour becomes something set apart from life and abstracted into the commodity of “degrees” which can be bought and sold on the educational market.

In this episode, we talk with Colleen Hooper (@hoopercolleen), assistant professor of dance at Point Park University. Hooper’s 2017 article in the Dance Research Journal, titled “Ballerinas on the Dole: Dance and the Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA), 1974-1982,” is the subject of most of our conversation.

Organized workers, often defying their timid union leadership, are on the march across the United States.

Columbia’s student workers delivered an invaluable lesson—one day longer, one day stronger—that you don’t have to have to go to graduate school to understand.

Articles in this series: Commons and classes before capitalism ‘Systematic theft of communal property’ Against Enclosure: The Commonwealth Men Dispossessed: Origins of the Working Class Against Enclosure: The Commoners Fight Back  by Ian Angus In 1542, Henry VIII gave his friend and privy councilor Sir William Herbert a gift: the buildings and lands of a […]

There appears to be growing consensus among economists and policy makers that inflation is now the main threat to the U.S. economy and the Federal Reserve Board needs to start ratcheting up interest rates to slow down economic activity.

Amid threats and intimidation, the workers’ action at Clover has been strengthened by worker solidarity as well as the increasing support of civil society for its boycott campaign.

2021 marked a historic year in labor organizing for workers in the US, with tens of thousands of workers in partaking in union votes and strike actions.

Politicians and the media work hard to give the impression that millions of low-wage workers are constantly seeking entry into the U.S. Most U.S. news consumers would probably be astonished to learn that the undocumented population here actually declined during the years from 2008 to 2016. It continued to decline at least until 2019.

Deprived of land and common rights, the English poor were forced into wage-labor. CAPITAL VERSUS COMMONS, 4

Amazon continues to abuse its warehouse workers, both in its day-to-day treatment of them and in its thuggish, law-breaking campaign to prevent unionization in the U.S.

It’s a historic win for reformers in one of the nation’s most important unions, where members have pushed for this change for decades.

Union negotiators said they were prepared to meet the company for another round of negotiations next week but their offer was rebuffed by bosses, who claimed they were left with no choice but to permanently replace those on strike.

On 19 November 2021, a week before the first anniversary of the farmers’ revolt, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi surrendered.