Subjects Archives: Labor

If you follow the news it must seem like joining a union is a step outside the norms of U.S. law.

Of all classes, the middle class is the one with the most people clamouring to be part of it. Many members of the ruling class prefer the label “middle” to one that makes capitalist dominance so overt. Many workers think that having a middle-income job by default puts them in the middle class. And people who want to downplay the working class’s revolutionary potential prefer to say,

The problem of precarious employment, non-standard labor relations concerns today an increasing number of employees. 

More than 160 years ago, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, in the “Communist Manifesto,” described workers as those “who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital”.

Measuring wages in the pandemic labor market

Late capitalism has exposed the drastic inequalities inherent to our neoliberal economy.

President Biden’s 2022 State of the Union Address included a call for a $15 federal minimum wage. According to an Economic Policy Institute study, a phased increase to a $15 federal minimum wage by 2025 would raise the earnings of 32 million workers—21% of the workforce, no small thing. 

“Two bills of spending that are more than $4 trillion. And we’re going to pretend that this is going to have no effect on jobs? No effect on inflation?” – Charles Lanes

Working-class people in the United States are now at a turning point–whether to compliantly return to the pre-Covid conditions capital set for them, or to shift toward a new militancy toward capitalism.

The company has billed itself as the everything store. Now Amazon is the throw-everything-at-them union-buster—trying every trick in the playbook to throttle worker organizing at its Staten Island warehouses in New York City.

According to Starbucks Workers United, which is organizing workers to form unions, workers from over 200 outlets have already approached the National Labor Relations Board for a union vote.

It seems like workers and their unions are in the news more than ever lately. Starbucks baristas, Amazon warehouse workers, John Deere strikers, and even New York Times tech workers, who just unionized, have all starred in the recent swell of labor coverage.

The twin phenomena associated with contemporary globalisation, of migration of capital from the metropolis to parts of the third world, and of migration of labour from the erstwhile second world to the metropolis, have the effect of weakening the working class movement everywhere.

Towards the end of the first chapter of Das Kapital, after having established the validity of the labor theory of value, Marx has a section on the “Fetishism of Commodities”.

First published in January 1972, Working is a baggy collection of over seven-hundred and sixty pages, most devoted to the reflections of ordinary Americans about their economic lives. From the Terkel archive, it’s clear that his interest in work was long standing and went well beyond the USA.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) job report offered some surprises, especially in light of dire predictions about the Omicron crisis. At first glance the impact seemed slight.

On Wednesday, February 9, teachers across Puerto Rico called for a national strike to protest the government and the Fiscal Control Board’s (FCB) cutting of wages and pensions.

The product of pedagogical labour becomes something set apart from life and abstracted into the commodity of “degrees” which can be bought and sold on the educational market.

In this episode, we talk with Colleen Hooper (@hoopercolleen), assistant professor of dance at Point Park University. Hooper’s 2017 article in the Dance Research Journal, titled “Ballerinas on the Dole: Dance and the Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA), 1974-1982,” is the subject of most of our conversation.

Organized workers, often defying their timid union leadership, are on the march across the United States.