Alex N. Press is a staff writer at Jacobin who covers labor organizing.
Earlier this month, nurses at Mission Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina voted to unionize. Taking place in one of the most anti-union states in the country, and challenging a bitterly anti-labor employer, the campaign is a monumental victory for labor.
Through “pro-labor” conservatives like Oren Cass, the populist right is offering an updated fantasy that Republicans are champions of the working class. They aren’t and never will be. But that doesn’t mean their pitch to working-class voters can’t succeed — especially when Democrats continue to abandon unions and the working class.
Respiratory therapists operate ventilators and perform crucial services in treating the coronavirus. They say they still don’t have the protective equipment they need.
Two days after Surly’s beer hall workers went public with a union campaign, management announced it would be closing the location indefinitely. The Minneapolis company says the shutdown was in the works for weeks — a claim workers say is absurd.
In AMC’s comedic drama series Lodge 49, webs of debt and despair, disappointed dreams, and displaced lives tie the characters together at first. But it’s solidarity that makes the bonds last.
Leading men’s tennis players are in preliminary discussions to form a union. Pro sports unions can wield enormous power — but they’re also not always easy to organize.
Strippers have at least one thing in common with Uber drivers: they’re the victims of rampant labor misclassification at the hands of their bosses. But Brandi Campbell, an adult dancer in Ohio, fought the practice in court and won. The law is clear: strippers are workers with the right to unionize and strike.
The outrageous shooting of an unarmed black man in Kenosha shows the difference between elected officials’ kind words and actual progress. The movement against police violence will be fighting for a long time.
Last week, Uber and Lyft were ordered to stop misclassifying their drivers as independent contractors. They’ve once again gotten out of doing so, granted a reprieve today by a judge in the face of the companies’ threatened capital strike.
With her deep and long-standing ties to the Silicon Valley elite, Kamala Harris’s selection as Joe Biden’s running mate has corporate leaders breathing a deep sigh of relief. In picking the California senator, Biden couldn’t be clearer that his will be an administration dedicated to shoring up a crumbling status quo.
At Epic Systems, a Wisconsin-based software company, workers had complaints that will be familiar to many workers across the United States: an oppressive culture of surveillance and control, executives pushing to end their pandemic-induced working from home. Now, Epic’s workers are organizing.
In an interview with Jacobin, former Labour Party shadow chancellor John McDonnell discusses Boris Johnson’s handling of the COVID crisis, recalls the radical atmosphere of the 1980s Labour Party, and draws the lessons from Jeremy Corbyn’s five years as party leader.
More than a century after the landmark Homestead strike against Andrew Carnegie’s steel empire, workers at four Pittsburgh museums — including three founded by Carnegie — are unionizing with the United Steelworkers. It’s the latest episode in a nationwide wave of museum organizing.
Seeking to maintain the momentum of the George Floyd protests, activists have launched an occupation outside City Hall in New York to demand a $1 billion cut in the NYPD budget. So far, there’s little sign that the city council or Mayor Bill de Blasio are prepared to give in.
In an interview, longtime socialist-feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham reflects on her decades on the Left, grappling with the reality of being a socialist from the middle class, and E. P. and Dorothy Thompson and the classic book The Making of the English Working Class.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos encouraged his white-collar workers to cancel meetings for Juneteenth and “reflect and support each other.” An Amazon warehouse worker fired after organizing for workplace protections thinks that’s “a bunch of bullshit.”
No Evil Foods markets itself as a left-wing, “revolutionary” food company. But its workers say the company recently busted their union drive and fired organizers.
During yesterday’s protests against the police murder of George Floyd, Amazon declared that it “stand[s] in solidarity with the Black community — our employees, customers, and partners — in the fight against systemic racism and injustice.” But the company is no racial justice ally — not least because it has resolutely attempted to smash its workers’ organizing efforts.
On Monday night, workers at a Chicago Amazon warehouse joined a nationwide wave of walkouts over what they say is management’s inadequate response to the coronavirus pandemic. One of the action’s organizers spoke to Jacobin about it.
We didn’t know we were entering a new era until it arrived. We can never go back.