Subjects Archives: Labor

  • Egyptian Labor Protest to Raise Minimum Wage

    “Hundreds of workers have showed up in order to demonstrate, calling for raising the national minimum wage, which remains unchanged from 1984 and stands at 35 Egyptian pounds [$7 per month], which is bloody pathetic to be honest.  And workers today are calling for raising it to 1,200 Egyptian pounds, which is a very reasonable […]

  • Over a Hundred Momentive Workers, Labor Leaders, and Activists Attend a Discussion of Tactics and Strategy with Author and Labor Activist Steve Early

    Momentive Performance Materials stewards and workers represented by IUE/CWA Local 81359 were joined by labor leaders and activists from around the Capital District of Upstate New York in a wide-ranging discussion of labor strategy and tactics on Wednesday, March 31 in Waterford, New York. Momentive workers, formerly employees of General Electric, suffered 25 to 50 […]

  • Honduras: Students, Trade Unionists, and Teachers March amidst Crisis at UNAH

      Tegucigalpa, Honduras — Scores of students, trade unionists, and teachers of the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) marched to the National Congress today in protest, due to the current crisis of this university, demanding that it be not closed. The march was composed of a student group from the University Revolutionary Front (FRU), […]

  • GTMO and Guantánamo: Labor Relations between Cuba and the United States

      Jana K. Lipman.  Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.  x + 325 pp.  $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-25539-5; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-520-25540-1. A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to serve on a Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations panel with Jana K. Lipman. […]

  • Egypt: Workers Protest against Tanta Flax & Oils Company

      In 2005 the Tanta Flax & Oils Company was privatized and subsequently bought by Saudi investor Abdellah El-Ka’aky.  In May 2009, workers launched a five-month strike backed by the state-controlled Egyptian Federation of Trade Unions (EFTU).  An agreement was reached but workers went back on strike in December to protest the deteriorating conditions in […]

  • Labor Voices for Single Payer: Interview with Jerry Tucker

    Union members who support single-payer health care have a message for Barack Obama: Ditch the compromised health care legislation that congressional Democrats cooked up and take another look at a Medicare-for-all system. When Obama used his State of the Union address to tell people to “let him know” if there’s a better approach that “will […]

  • Vietnamese Daughters in Transition: Factory Work and Family Relations

      This paper assesses the social implications of employment opportunities in manufacturing for rural young unmarried Vietnamese women.  Interested in the ways in which intimate relations, identities and structures of exchange within the family are reconfigured through the migration and work experience, we interview young, single daughters who had obtained employment as garment factory workers […]

  • The Making of Japan’s New Working Class: “Freeters” and the Progression from Middle School to the Labor Market

      This article is a modified and developed version of a chapter from Social Class in Contemporary Japan: Structures, Socialization and Strategies, edited by Ishida Hiroshi and David H. Slater, Routledge, 2009.  For a brief outline of the book’s arguments, please see <japanfocus.org/data/Social_Class_5.htm>. Introduction: The “New Working Class” of Urban Japan Tomo was a first-year […]

  • Invitation to a Home-Based Worker Organizing Forum

      Dear Brother or Sister: We are writing because of our shared interest in the challenge of organizing and representing home-based workers. As labor activists, direct care providers, or academic researchers, we have all been involved in aiding or studying organizing work among publicly-funded personal care attendants and child care providers, plus other types of […]

  • Labor Leaders of Venezuela’s Heavy Industries Respond to Electricity-Saving Measures

    The Venezuelan government’s measures to reduce national electricity consumption amidst nationwide shortages and rolling power outages have provoked varied responses from unionists in the basic industries, especially the steel and aluminum sectors. Venezuela’s electricity consumption has increased by more than 40% over the last ten years, driven largely by five years of consecutive high economic […]

  • The Changing Face of Labor, 1983-2008

    The kind of left-wing politics that arises when men in the private sector are the majority of organized labor and the kind that may arise when women in the public sector are the majority of it cannot be the same.  In the core capitalist countries, it is likely to be a Left which has figured […]

  • Labor Movement?

    The 2010 Statistical Abstract of the United States (and especially Tables 574 to 650), published by the US Census Bureau, provides many statistics that can update understanding of today’s working class and possibilities of its movement.  The Abstract counts 154 million people as members of the US labor force in 2008.  Of these, 129 million […]

  • The “Just Something” Rule

      I read volume 1 of Marx’s Capital while working on a production line in a food factory.  I don’t mean I read it during my tea breaks, I read it while “working” on the line.  I had an injury and was doing a ‘quality control’ job which entailed sitting next to a conveyor watching […]

  • Statement of Keith Hall, Commissioner, Bureau of Labor Statistics, before the Joint Economic Committee, United States Congress

    Madam Chair and Members of the Committee: Thank you for the opportunity to discuss the employment and unemployment data we released this morning. In October, the unemployment rate rose to 10.2 percent, the highest rate since April 1983, and nonfarm payroll employment declined by 190,000.  Since the start of the recession, payroll employment has fallen […]

  • The Economic Crisis: How It Impacts African-Americans and Labor

      Lecture delivered at the Economic and Black Labor Forum, the Philadelphia Community Institute for Africana Studies, 22 October 22 2009 The present Great Recession is the latest and largest crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression of the 1930s.  During the Great Depression over half of all African-American men were unemployed.  The present Great […]

  • Why the Health Insurance Excise Tax Is a Bad Idea

      Twenty years ago, 60,000 workers from New York City to Maine rallied against healthcare cost-shifting at the telecom giant then known as NYNEX (since “rebranded” as Verizon). NYNEX was a very profitable, multinational company seeking to capitalize on a demoralizing decade of lost strikes, contract givebacks and widespread unionbusting.  At a time when many […]

  • Troy Labor Council Resolution for a National March on Washington for Peace, Jobs and Healthcare Justice

    Whereas: The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, attacks on Pakistan, military aid to Colombia, Israel and many of the countries that use US aid for repression of indigenous and popular movements, are making the people of the US and the world less safe. And Whereas: These wars and military aid are bankrupting the people of the […]

  • Open Letter to All Those Concerned about the Labor Movement

      Note to New York Times Readers In his November 18th article “Some Organizers Protest Their Union’s Tactics,” the New York Times‘ Steven Greenhouse cites a couple of sentences from this letter and links to it.  While it is good to see the New York Times examine important debates within the U.S. labor movement, for […]

  • Swaziland: PUDEMO Welcomes COSATU Congress Resolutions

      The recently concluded Congress of COSATU among other things declared to the world that COSATU will campaign for PUDEMO to be recognised as the genuine representative of the oppressed people of Swaziland. Further, that PUDEMO must be given diplomatic status accorded all liberation movements in various countries. This is a bold and very revolutionary […]

  • Labor: A Renewal of Solidarity and Struggle — or Continued Decline?

    The following report on the 2009 AFL-CIO Convention in Pittsburgh is posted by Jerry Tucker, special correspondent to the Monthly Review and MRZine.  Tucker is a former International Executive Board Member of the UAW and a founder of the New Directions Movement within that union.  He is also a co-founder of the Center for Labor […]