Subjects Archives: Labor

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.

Columbia’s student workers delivered an invaluable lesson—one day longer, one day stronger—that you don’t have to have to go to graduate school to understand.

Articles in this series: Commons and classes before capitalism ‘Systematic theft of communal property’ Against Enclosure: The Commonwealth Men Dispossessed: Origins of the Working Class Against Enclosure: The Commoners Fight Back  by Ian Angus In 1542, Henry VIII gave his friend and privy councilor Sir William Herbert a gift: the buildings and lands of a […]

There appears to be growing consensus among economists and policy makers that inflation is now the main threat to the U.S. economy and the Federal Reserve Board needs to start ratcheting up interest rates to slow down economic activity.

Amid threats and intimidation, the workers’ action at Clover has been strengthened by worker solidarity as well as the increasing support of civil society for its boycott campaign.