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Barry Eidlin is an associate professor of sociology at McGill University and the author of Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada.
The story of the Canadian union Unifor is the story of a union that started at the vanguard of class struggle, seeing its role as advancing a broad vision of working-class politics — only to turn into a narrow, sectionalist union today.
In the United States and Canada, we’ve seen an increase in labor militancy. This upsurge is a chance to inject working-class politics into the political arena, which has so far been mostly unresponsive to workers’ demands.
Last year the Teamsters and the UAW both won historic contract victories. Those wins were made possible by government anti-corruption efforts and, more importantly, by decades of organizing by members to make their unions more militant and democratic.
With its recently announced drive to organize nonunion automakers, the UAW is tackling the legacy of previous failures to organize the South. The union is wagering that the momentum of its Big Three strike will allow it to win where it’s fallen short before.
The UAW just reached a tentative contract deal with automaker Stellantis, which agreed to reopen a shuttered plant. By reasserting control over company investment decisions, the union is carving out a more expansive role for workers in shaping the economy.
The ongoing UAW strike, led by president Shawn Fain, is a marked departure from the union’s recent history. In many ways Fain is channeling early UAW leader Walter Reuther — before the union and Reuther himself downsized their ambitions.
The UAW’s ongoing “stand-up strike” represents an earth-shattering departure from the union’s recent history. It’s the fruit of decades of efforts to transform the union and return it to its militant roots.
The contract that Teamsters just won at UPS isn’t perfect, and we should keep broader strategic goals in mind when evaluating union settlements. But we can’t lose sight of the fact that this is the best UPS contract ever negotiated.
One thing is clear from the Teamsters’ recent tentative agreement for UPS workers: thanks to members’ organizing, it is far and away the best contract ever negotiated at the company. The problems UPS workers will have to solve now are very good problems to have.
Michigan’s repeal of its “right-to-work” law could be a huge boon to labor — not because of the technicalities of the law itself, but because the entire country is hearing the message that the state will not tolerate flagrant union busting.
The recent academic workers’ strike at the University of California was the largest of its kind in US history. It also saw robust internal debate about whether or not the contract was good enough.
By ramming a contract down railworkers’ throats, Joe Biden reinforced a basic fact of American life: when you’re at work, you have no democratic rights.
By ramming a contract down railworkers’ throats that they had previously rejected, Joe Biden turned to a kind of authoritarianism that cemented a basic fact of American life: when you’re at work, you have no democratic rights.
No leftist writer can compare to Mike Davis — not in clarity, breadth, generosity, or ironclad commitment to the working class. Davis has died, but his ideas will continue to find life in generations of leftist activists and thinkers to come.
On Monday, ballots were sent to United Auto Workers members for the union’s first direct election of top officers. The vote gives rank-and-file members the chance to elect officers who will break with decades of corrupt, business-friendly union leadership.
Every blip in worker struggle raises a question: Is labor finally turning the corner? But our current moment features both pissed-off workers and successful militant union reform movements. Together, the two could turn worker anger into something much bigger.
With the victory of a coalition of reformers in the Teamsters, the union has enormous potential to organize Amazon, rebuild strength at shop floors throughout North America, and perhaps even go on strike against UPS.
Over many years, when the labor movement and socialism were at their weakest in decades, Mike Parker helped train a new generation of rigorous thinkers and activists in management’s latest schemes and how to fight back.
When conservatives claim that we can’t afford new social programs, what they really mean is that they think individuals and families should figure out how to handle the costs of necessary care on their own.
The battle for labor law reform has historically been one of the most difficult in US politics. Passing the PRO Act is crucial — but workers may not be able to win it without flexing their strike muscles.