Workers Want to Unionize. Will Union Leaders Respond?
Conditions are ripe for labor’s revitalization. So why aren’t unions stepping up with massive financial and organizational support for workers’ organizing efforts?
88 Articles by: Eric Blanc
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Eric Blanc is an assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University. He is the author of Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics and Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882-1917).
A Trader Joe’s Worker Says She Was Fired for Organizing a Union. We Spoke to Her.
The latest union hot spot is a Trader Joe’s in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. As at union drives at companies like Starbucks and Amazon, workers say Trader Joe’s has fired a key organizer for union activism. We talked to the fired worker about the campaign.
10 Years Ago Today, the Chicago Teachers Union Strike Changed Public Education
When the Chicago Teachers Union went on strike against Mayor Rahm Emanuel ten years ago, corporate education reform was on the march. The CTU won that strike, beat back the neoliberal Democrats, and turned the tide in favor of public education.
Chipotle Workers on How They Won the First Chipotle Union in the United States
Last month, Chipotle workers in Lansing, Michigan, became the first workers at the corporation to unionize. We spoke to three of the Chipotle workers and union activists about how they did it.
Comrade Thomas Piketty, Welcome to the Socialist Movement
For years, Thomas Piketty has articulated a cogent critique of 21st-century capitalism. He now appears to be moving beyond just critique to call for a 21st-century socialism.
Amazon Workers Are Organizing, and Elected Officials Are Supporting Them
A reborn workers’ movement needs both organized workplace militancy and left-wing politicians that back them. Sunday’s Staten Island Amazon rallies — attended by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other elected officials — featured both.
The Workers Behind Amazon’s Historic First Union Explain How They Did It
Staten Island Amazon workers endured thunderstorms, racism, and arrests to organize in break rooms, bus stops, and grocery aisles to win their union — and one of the world’s most powerful companies couldn’t stop them. Here’s how they did it.
How Amazon’s Immigrant Workers Organized to Win a Union on Staten Island
Amazon Labor Union’s spectacular victory in Staten Island has rightly captured headlines across the country. A key part of this win, however, has not yet been explored: how immigrant workers organized each other to support the union.
Here’s How We Beat Amazon
Amazon workers in Staten Island have achieved the most important labor victory in the United States since the 1930s. Here’s an inside account of how they did it.
Minneapolis Educators Just Showed the Country How to Strike and Win
The Minneapolis teachers’ union just won a nearly three-week-long strike. We talked to two strike leaders about what they saw on the picket line and how militant unionism that fights for the whole working class can spread across the country.
Why Minneapolis Educators Are on Strike
Teachers and support staff in Minneapolis and Saint Paul say they’re no longer willing to let their students pay for the mistakes made by officials who’ve neglected and mismanaged the public education system. Now they’re on strike.
Yes, Social Media Can Help With Real-World Organizing
We can’t change the world just by posting on social media. But as the 2018 red state teachers’ strikes show, if organizers make strategic choices about their online organizing, social media can be used to build mass militant actions like strikes.
Socialists Should Take the Right Lessons From the Russian Revolution
Socialists have rightly taken inspiration from the Russian Revolution for generations, but many of the lessons drawn from it are wrong for our own time. To make change today, we need to take democratic socialism seriously as a theory and practice.
Nina Turner: “Good Ideas Are Not Enough, We Need to Marry Our Ideas to Power”
Former state senator and Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign cochair Nina Turner is running for Congress. In an interview with Jacobin, Turner reflects on the heartbreaks and new opportunities of both Bernie campaigns, the left agenda she will bring to Capitol Hill, and why policies like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal are racial justice issues.
The Birth of the Labour Party Has Many Lessons for Socialists Today
American leftists are constantly wrestling with the question of how to relate to the Democratic Party. The history of the UK Labour Party’s formation through a break with the Liberals a century ago is full of lessons for socialists today.
Learning to Strike and Win
If we’re going to reverse the ravages of neoliberalism, we’ll need to rebuild a global labor movement that knows how to strike and win. A recent international “Strike School,” led by labor organizer Jane McAlevey, brought 3,000 trade unionists and activists from seventy countries to try to do just that.
We Were Right To Celebrate Trump’s Defeat. Now We’ll Have To Stay in the Streets for the Next 4 Years.
The mass celebrations of Trump’s defeat yesterday were a beautiful outpouring of collective political joy. We can harness that energy to build a mass working-class politics against Joe Biden’s neoliberalism.
It’s Not Enough to Fight — Labor and the Left Have to Be Serious About How to Win
Unions and the Left across the globe have the power to defeat the billionaires. But Jane McAlevey explains that doing this requires we learn the best traditions of labor organizing — and that we talk to people who don’t already agree with us and win them over to our side.
A General Strike to Stop Trump? Some Unions Are Saying It’s Time.
The Rochester, New York labor council recently resolved to “prepare for and enact a general strike of all working people” if Trump tries to steal the election. The rest of the labor movement needs to pay attention — labor can help stop an authoritarian power grab if unions start making plans right now.
The Teachers’ “Red for Ed” Movement Is Far From Dead
In 2018, the “Red for Ed” teachers’ strike wave exploded, first in West Virginia, then in Oklahoma, Arizona, and beyond. It shook the foundations of public education and teacher unionism in America — and may play a key role in fighting COVID-19–induced education austerity in the near future.