Subjects Archives: Labor

  • Shoppers at the clothing retailer Zara were confronted with the company's unfair business practices recently, as factory workers attached notes to products drawing attention to the wages they were owed. (Photo: MIke Mozart/Flickr/cc)

    ‘I made this… but didn’t get paid’: Garment workers appeal directly to shoppers

    Factory workers draw attention to mistreatment and unpaid wages with notes hidden inside clothing items.

  • Neil Martinson, A portrait of Annie Spike at work (1978)

    Women and work

    It has often been claimed that the radical documentary practice of the 1970s attended to class politics to the exclusion of gender. This was one of the core arguments for a staged practice of photography.

  • Frank Little's tombstone

    The IWW saga in new light

    Frank Little and the IWW is a family story—Jane Botkin’s own family story, as she rightly says. It is hers because she did not know anything about her great uncle growing up. She puts the story together, piece by piece, before our eyes, and that is large part of the pleasure of this text.

  • Cold, angry, and surrounded by chicken

    For six months, reporter Saša Uhlová worked in the lowest-paid manual jobs in the Czech Republic, having a go at work in a hospital laundry room, a chicken processing plant, as a cashier in a supermarket, in a razorblade factory, and in a waste-sorting plant. All these jobs are indispensable, yet they are severely underpaid. How do people make ends meet on just a few hundred pounds a month?

  • Economy rains down Rose Parade (photo: capoliticalreview.com)

    Promises, promises

    They keep promising, ever since the recovery from the Great Recession started more than eight years ago, that workers’ wages will finally begin to increase. But they’re not.

  • Thumbnail image for Cambodian garment workers rise up and face a crackdown.

    Sweatshop scandals and the global labour arbitrage

    A look into the sweatshop scandals and the global labour arbitrage.

  • People & communities should have the right to control their energy future

    UK unions call for energy to be returned to public ownership

    The annual congress of the UK Trades Union Congress (TUC) has passed a historic composite resolution on climate change that supports the energy sector being returned to public ownership and democratic control.

  • Two men sentenced to perform unpaid community work wearing tabards emblazoned with 'Community Payback' to make their punishment visible

    Work, capital and the ‘administration of punishment’

    Criminal justice and welfare policies routinely produce a distinct labour force in Britain, disposable by design. This article examines recent policy developments driving these labour forms, and explores their implications for the meaning of work.

  • Latino field workers in Yuma, AZ

    Why do we still have employer sanctions?

    The AFL-CIO was one of the main supporters of employer sanctions back in 1986. It only took 13 years for the labor federation to learn its lesson: in February 2000 it officially called for the elimination of the policy. Another 17 years have now passed, and the case against the sanctions has only grown more solid.

  • AFSCME members rally

    Unions edge closer to existential crisis

    Our nation is often flummoxed by the chaotic and deceptive behavior of the Trump administration. Yet, these distractions disguise an economic agenda. That agenda is unapologetically determined to benefit corporate financial interests against the interests of all working people.

  • William Pelz - "A People's History of Modern Europe" | Seminary Co-op Bookstores

    Making their own history

    More than half a century ago, E. P. Thompson pioneered a new approach to labor history in The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson was dismayed with the bourgeois idea that history is made by great men, and the occasional princess or queen, but also frustrated with socialist histories that replace statesmen and business moguls with wise, if not infallible, party leaders and union bosses allegedly executing the iron laws of history.

  • Working at Facebook

    Who’s working for Facebook?

    There are plenty of reasons to be interested in—and, even more, concerned about—Facebook. Many of them are raised in the recent review of Facebook-related books by John Lanchester [ht: db]: the fragmentation of the polity (via the targeting of posts), the dissemination of “fake news” (which played an important role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election), the undermining of other livelihoods (such as journalism and music), the level of surveillance of users (much more than any national government), the violation of anti-monopoly rules (via individualized pricing), and so on.

  • Free Hugo rally IUPAT District Council 9 - International Union of Painters and Allied Trades

    Painters union fights to free member from immigration jail

    Imagine being arrested and detained for months just for showing up to work. That’s what happened to construction workers Hugo Mejia and Rodrigo Nuñez on May 3, when their company sent them to work on a hospital inside Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California.

  • Chirlane McCray and Bill de Blasio

    A tale of many cities: potholes in the road to municipal reform

    As a growing number of groups on the left have begun dabbling in local electoral politics—most notably via the Democratic Socialists of America (or DSA-backed candidacies)—we would do well to heed the warning of Juan Gonzalez about the “consultant class” (currently in the employ of Mayor de Blasio). The allure of corner-cutting political consultants, corporate cash, and the always pernicious influence of pay-to-play after any election day success by would-be reformers are pitfalls that left electoral efforts must avoid at all cost.

  • Trump on Infrastructure and making America great again.

    Trump and the infrastructure of fascism

    Let this be a warning to economists, labor leaders, Democratic officials and all progressives fighting  for economic and social justice: “progressive-appearing” economic proposals from Trump  are likely to be thinly veiled attempts to suck in unsuspecting allies in support of a neo-fascist, authoritarian movement that is increasingly showing its true colors. They are designed, quite clearly, to build support for Trump and his business allies. Don’t be fooled, don’t be bought off, and be vigilant.

  • Members of labor unions and Occupy Wall Street demonstrators participate in a "March For Jobs and Fairness" on Dec 1, 2011 in New York City. Thousands attended the late afternoon rally which included members of over 300 New York City and tri-state unions. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

    Americans at work: not a pretty picture

    Worker organizing and workplace struggles for change need to be encouraged and supported. A recent Pew Research Center survey showed growing support for unions, especially among younger workers.  It is not hard to understand why.

  • An occupation Camp in Filhos da Luta, Pernambuco in 2014. (Photo by Mel Gurr)

    Land (in) justice in Brazil

    The implementation of austerity measures in the Brazilian countryside, then, casts a long shadow on the potential of farming and land reform to provide the next generation with a sustainable future. It threatens decades of progress made by land justice warriors.

  • Electronics made in China

    False promises: Trump and the revitalization of the US economy

    President Trump likes to talk up his success in promoting the reindustrialization of the United States and the return of good manufacturing jobs.  But there is little reason to take his talk seriously.

  • Development in Cambodia

    Land grabs and uneven development in Cambodia

    The global labor arbitrage means the only competitive “advantage” available to most countries is forcing workers to accept slave wages and environmental standards low enough to lure in multinationals. If the population resists, the only means available to diffuse it is brutal repression.

  • Dictator boss

    How bosses are (literally) like dictators

    There are three types of work places governments, there are public, private and the other. Public government simply means that the power of the business is spread between the higher ups and the regular employees, while private is where the big guy up top has all the power and the business is his and his alone. The other is everything from family owned and operated to employee owned and opporated. This in turn is how a small government is ran or dictated.