Subjects Archives: Labor

In the decades following, the number of prisoners decreased to a historic minimum. But with cutbacks in the welfare state, the prison population exploded from about 200,000 in 1975 to 2,300,000 in 2013 (Scherrer and Shah, 2017: 37) and prison labor for commercial purposes became legal again. Today, about 15% of the inmates in federal and state prisons perform work for companies such as Boeing, Starbucks and Victoria’s Secret. Migrants detained for violating immigration laws are one of the fastest growing segments of prison labor. Under the Trump administration, their numbers are most likely to increase.

The first thing to understand about colleges and universities is that they are workplaces. And like all workplaces in capitalist societies, they are organized as hierarchies, with power radiating downward.… Those at the top have as their central objective control over the enterprise, so that their power can be maintained, that revenues from tuition, grants, money from various levels of government, and the like keep flowing in, that the prestige of the college or university grows. And, of great importance, that those below them do not and cannot make trouble by challenging their authority.

Those who advocate “freeing the market” claim that doing so will encourage competition and thereby increase majority well-being. These advocates have certainly had their way shaping economic policies. And the results? According to several leading economists, the results include the growing monopolization of product markets and the steady decline in labour’s share of national income. Neither outcome desirable.

Donald Trump has nominated Neil Gorsuch, a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. The Senate should not confirm Judge Gorsuch. This post gives one cardinal reason for rejecting the nomination.

Something new is taking shape in the world: in more than 30 countries, people are calling for an international women’s strike on the 8th of March.

What would happen to Trump’s support if more of us understood that the real effect of ICE raids is the transfer of money out of workers’ paychecks into the bank accounts of unscrupulous employers like Trump himself?

Since 2011, the torrent of ill-informed, inaccurate and often entirely dishonest analysis of events in Syria has been unremitting. I have written previously about the dangers of using simplistic explanations to make sense of the conflict, a problem that has surfaced repeatedly over the past five years. However, there is a greater problem at large.

This dream.  Something is in the house, something’s breaking, the things I love are going away.  I reach for Laura, she becomes translucent, evaporates.  I wake up, telling myself this dream means I’m worried about how tired and worn Laura has grown from years of activist work trying to get people out of prison.  I’ve […]

We lost Fidel.  We gained a history of examples and wisdom. The story of Fidel is beyond words — we cannot describe it with words alone.  So I would like to just give a testimony. He used all his wisdom, knowledge, leadership, and dedication to build, over 60 years, a united and organized people, who […]

Today’s post discusses the way that neoliberal policies embraced by the Democratic Party resulted in job loss in key states.  Bear with me: there are facts and figures here that make the case.  Tomorrow, I will continue to discuss these issues in the context of “domestic” job displacement.  The third post will discuss a progressive […]

  Gomtipur (Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India) was once called the Manchester of Gujarat.  Did the decline of the mills contribute to the rise of the rightwing? Gujarat/ Malegaon films’ update: April 14. 2015 (rakeshs.distribution@gmail.com) #Crowdfunding #FinalSolutionRevisited… Posted by Rakesh Sharma on Tuesday, April 14, 2015 Rakesh Sharma is an internationally-acclaimed Indian documentary filmmaker.  Follow Sharma on […]

Joe Burns.  Strike Back: Using the Militant Tactics of Labor’s Past to Reignite Public Sector Unionism Today.  Brooklyn, NY: IG Publishing, 2014.  ISBN: 978-1-935439-89-9 (paperback). Many conservative whites today lament — and you can see this exploited by the Tea Party — that nobody cares about them: people care about Blacks, about Latinos, about women, […]

  Communiqué from La Voz de Vieques on behalf of a people in struggle The general silence was strange in the face of the thinly veiled simulation exercises for a military occupation to crush the potential popular insurgency as a result of the fall of the colony. No one doubts that the colonial farce imposed […]

  “Once labor has been embodied in instruments of production and enters the further process of labor to play its role there, it may be called, following Marx, dead labor [. . .].  The ideal toward which capitalism strives is the domination of dead labor over living labor.” — Harry Braverman1 “[T]here are no jobs […]

It’s one of the universals of organizing — first you make a list.

Elementary teacher Alix Gonzalez Guevara remembers staying up late transferring data about each school from a district-published book into an Excel spreadsheet: region, address, how many teachers, how many students.

This became a Google document, an online spreadsheet available to everyone working on the campaign. The schools were grouped by regions. Within each, a couple of lead activists took responsibility to find people to do outreach at each school.

  Numsa General Secretary’s Presentation to the Cape Town Press Club, February 11, 2014 I speak to you today with a powerful and united mandate from 341,150 metalworkers. They made their views extremely clear in our workers’ parliament in December last year — the parliament we called the Numsa Special National Congress.  In that parliament […]

  The speech below was delivered by the President of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP), Dave Coles, to the labor breakfast titled “Confronting the Climate Crisis: Can Labor Help Shape an Effective Strategy?” held at the City University of New York on 17 January 2013. The obvious answer to the question […]

  Najaf, Iraq, November 11, 2012 I returned from Baghdad last night.  Over coffee this morning, I filled the father of my host family in on my trip.  I told him it was wonderful to see everyone, but I only heard sad stories. A few minutes ago a fierce wind rose, blowing the trees and […]

My friend and colleague of more than 25 years died today from pancreatic cancer.  If you never had the privilege of meeting and working with Jerry Tucker, it is truly a shame.  Rarely do we cross paths with someone who makes such a difference in our lives.  Jerry was such a man. I first heard […]

In the wake of last year’s long overdue U.S. troop withdrawal, mainstream media coverage of Iraq has dwindled to near zero — except when there’s another suicide bombing (which usually merits just a paragraph or two in world news round-ups). The fate of costly U.S.-funded projects and institutions is little known or largely forgotten, $800 […]