Subjects Archives: Labor

Parts 1 and 2 of an interview with Michael D. Yates by Farooque Chowdhury. The emancipation of labor is one of the foremost questions in all exploitative societies and societies in transition.

The economic reality the U.S. public deals with differs so much from selective statistics reported by the media that there’s a split in perceptions of the actual U.S. economy as well.

Farmers in France are not a homogenous block, and the left needs to be able to unite with its more progressive elements to generalize revolt, argues John Mullen.

What does Lenin say to us in today’s post-Soviet world and what is his legacy, asks VIJAY PRASHAD. VLADIMIR ILYICH ULANOV

This is an extract from the introduction to Alex Snowdon’s forthcoming book on Lenin, to be published by Counterfire, where he outlines the key stages of Lenin’s life as a revolutionary.

Laid-off workers of the former GKN plant in Campi Bisenzio, who have been leading a 900-day long struggle, have proposed to take over the plant by forming a cooperative to facilitate futuristic production.

In 2023, TV studios cut back on both product and labor—and labor struck back. Writers and actors, having had enough of belt tightening and penny pinching, joined many other unions in either threatening to strike or striking. Workers changed how the story was told, showing that studios, their bloated salaries, and their failure to compensate those actually creating the profit, were to blame for the current conjuncture.

Pavlina Tcherneva, a Professor of Economics at Bard College and a Research Scholar at the Levy Institute, has written a concisely, argued case for a federal job guarantee within the context of a Green New Deal.

On Nov. 23, close to 600,000 public sector workers in Quebec were on strike. Considering that Quebec has around 4,439,000 people active in the labour market, this represents 13.5 per cent of all workers in the province!

Every year, thousands of healthcare workers leave South Africa, in order to chase better opportunities, as wealthier countries exploit desperate working conditions faced by them. This brain drain is a direct result of neoliberal policies, especially austerity.

Let’s hope Swedish workers win and workers in all countries where Tesla operates take note and act accordingly.

A review of Robert Cherny’s “Harry Bridges Labor Radical, Labor Legend”, University of Illinois Press 2023.

While Elon Musk grabbed headlines again after Starship’s second test flight, his workers continue to toil under high stress and the lack of safety.

Samir Amin, the late Africanist, Marxist, and revolutionary theorist, wrote in 2019: “the proletariat seems to disappear just at the moment it has become more widespread.” Samir was not wrong.

Stephen Franklin on labor’s losses—and explosive resurgence.

Adivasis (literally, “original inhabitants”, equivalent to “indigenous peoples”) have been and are being sacrificed in the union government’s uranium mining and processing projects in what is now the State of Jharkhand, earlier the State of Bihar, where the public enterprise, Uranium Corporation of India Ltd (UCIL) began underground uranium mining and processing plant, twenty-four km west of Jaduguda.

No federal heat standard exists and lobbyists, corporate interests and those with fiercely anti-regulatory agendas have been vocal and active in keeping it that way.

While handing over tax concessions to capitalists to ‘promote employment’, the Centre is not spending to fill the large number of government vacancies, or on MGNREGS.

The UAW’s call for unions to align their contract expirations is legitimately achievable. But the work starts now.

The cost-of-living crisis on top of the extreme exploitative conditions of the garment industry has erupted into a major outbreak of workers’ unrest, reports John Clarke.