Subjects Archives: Labor

With the specter of a national rail strike in the United States looming, two meetings took place on Wednesday night.

Following Labour Day, this column explores the origin of the phrase sex work and how sex workers are an important part of the labour movement.

Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle

The long and distant epoch of pre-history, dated to the time before the start of the Common Era, is conventionally divided into three periods: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age.

The rail workers’ leader offers the most visible opposition to Britain’s Tory government.

A Hyundai subsidiary used up to fifty underage migrant workers at an auto plant known for hazardous conditions, according to former and current employees.

The value of the federal minimum wage has reached its lowest point in 66 years, according to an EPI analysis of recently released Consumer Price Index (CPI) data.

Human capital theory cannot solve our economic woes. David Ridley says we need a socialist alternative.

After a long four-year hiatus, the Labor Notes Conference is back, and bigger than ever with a record-breaking 4,000 registering.

In this third part of my series on the future of work, I want to deal with the impact of automation, in particular robots and artificial intelligence (AI) on jobs. I have covered this issue of the relationship between human labour and machines before, including robots and AI.  But is there anything new that we can find after the COVID slump?

In the first post of my Future of Work series, I looked at the impact of working from home and remote work which has mushroomed since the COVID pandemic.

To Wall Street and its backers, the solution to any price inflation is to reduce wages and public social spending. The orthodox way to do this is to push the economy into recession in order to reduce hiring. Rising unemployment will oblige labor to compete for jobs that pay less and less as the economy slows.

​The U.S. social democratic journal Jacobin recently published an article by Ben Burgis that was a half hearted defence of Marx’s theory of exploitation.

Our nation incarcerates more than 1.2 million people in state and federal prisons, and two out of three of these incarcerated people are also workers. In most instances, the jobs these nearly 800,000 incarcerated workers have look similar to those of millions of people working on the outside.

Slip slidin’ away—that is what tends to happen to pro-worker reforms in our economic system. Things are structured so that without constant vigilance and struggle on our part, gains are gradually undone. A case in point: overtime pay.

Counterfire’s weekly digest with the latest on strikes and workplace struggles.

Inflation continues to run hot—and now, finally, the debate about inflation is heating up.

A few weeks ago, the world’s richest man Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, told his employees that they must return to the office or get out of the company.  Musk wrote in an email that everybody at Tesla must spend at least 40 hours a week in the office.

New Orleans Starbucks workers at 7700 Maple Street are the first in the city to file for union certification, amidst dozens of nationwide unionization efforts at the country’s largest coffee chain.

U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell said his goal is “to get wages down,” complaining workers have too much power in the labor market. Economist Michael Hudson says this is “junk economics,” and corporate monopolies are driving inflation, not wages.