Kendra Strauss is director of the Labour Studies Program and associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University.
A recently unearthed conversation between Barack Obama and reporters, held days before Donald Trump took office, reveals an outgoing president unable to let go of his allegiance to the “norms”-venerating, elite-driven politics that doomed his presidency.
The water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi, wasn’t the product of government mismanagement. It was the result of Wall Street jacking up the city’s interest rates, which left residents with decaying infrastructure that couldn’t even deliver clean water.
Joe Biden campaigned on decriminalizing marijuana but has done nothing about it while in office. He has the power to stop the senseless persecution of weed — he should use it immediately.
Cattle barons carved up Texas with barbed wire in the late 19th century, separating poor farmers and landless cowboys from vital resources for their struggling cattle herds. So the cowboys formed fence-cutting gangs to preserve the open range.
In the early 1980s, Jon Melrod worked in a Wisconsin auto plant and published a shop-floor newspaper, Fighting Times. When the company sued him and his coworkers for denouncing a “scab of the month” in the paper, the rank and filers fought back — and won.
Justin Trudeau’s Canadian government has eagerly embraced NATO’s new “strategic concept”: expansion. The strategy is a return to the Cold War — and a recipe for more frequent military conflict.
Lula won the first round of Brazil’s presidential election yesterday and should beat Jair Bolsonaro in the runoff later this month. But Bolsonaro and his allies outperformed expectations — and Brazil’s far right remains a potent threat to democracy.
The invasion of Ukraine is not simply a product of Vladimir Putin’s expansionist mindset. It corresponds to a project for Russian capitalism that he and his allies have pursued since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein on why today’s union activists should look to the example of North Carolina black and white tobacco workers, who organized a union and went on strike in the teeth of the Jim Crow South.
With his original war aims in shambles, a desperate Vladimir Putin is openly threatening nuclear warfare in Ukraine. The rhetoric of nuclear retaliation and escalation is a risk to the entire world, and, yes, you should be alarmed.
Barry Hines is best known as author of Kestrel for a Knave, adapted for film by Ken Loach. His newly rereleased novel, The Gamekeeper, offers a searing portrait of how capitalism steals nature from working-class people.
Twentieth-century Aboriginal workers laboring for sheep and cattle stations in Western Australia’s Pilbara region endured conditions comparable to slavery. In 1946, they walked off the job — and founded the modern land rights movement.
The mass destruction caused by 20th-century wars created new forms of artifact preservation and exhibition, backed by Western international groups. But calls to repatriate artifacts are calling into question norms of commemoration and public display.
As Quebecers head to the polls on Monday, the waning sovereignty movement has lost ground to insular, xenophobic traditionalism. In an increasingly disenfranchised society, an exclusionary Quebec is a sign of fractured federalism.
Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency has been a destructive clown show. A Lula win today can help rebuild Brazil’s democracy.
Socialist actor, musician, and civil rights campaigner Paul Robeson viewed the Haitian Revolution as a guiding light in the struggle for freedom and dignity. In 1936, he played the revolutionary leader in C. L. R. James’s play Toussaint Louverture.
It’s no mystery why millions of workers are quitting their jobs: pay is low, conditions are terrible, and on-the-job disrespect is rampant. But the best way to transform a terrible job isn’t to leave it — it’s to organize a union.
Enmeshed in a colonial relationship with the US and abandoned by their own establishment politicians, Puerto Ricans are being forced to forge their own recovery after Hurricane Fiona. But they’re also dreaming of a different, more just future.
Black sharecroppers organizing a union were slaughtered en masse 103 years ago this week in the Elaine Massacre. It was one of the US’s worst episodes of racist violence — and a reminder that Jim Crow was about keeping the masses divided and labor brutalized.
British writer Ian McEwan wanted to deliver a literary manifesto for liberal centrism with his new book Lessons. But the result is an aimless, meandering novel that reveals his creative exhaustion and bewilderment at the state of the world.