Paul Prescod is a Jacobin contributing editor.
Labor leader Tony Mazzocchi believed unions could inspire their members to engage in a broader political movement of working people. His Local 149 did just that in the 1950s — and in a suburban environment where no one thought it possible.
The Teamsters’ Martin Luther King Jr Day mobilization was an encouraging early sign that recently elected union reformers intend to hit the ground running by organizing members around concrete contract demands. They’ll need that energy during contract negotiations in 2023.
In 1966, New York City public transit workers went on strike for a better contract, paralyzing the life of the city. The strike showed that New York couldn’t function without their labor and forced reluctant bosses to concede to their demands.
Everybody needs high-speed internet. But private corporations will never provide it. The solution: treat internet infrastructure as a public utility, funded by the public and built by union workers.
Paul Prescod is a socialist, teacher, and longtime Jacobin contributor who is running for Pennsylvania state senate. In an interview, Prescod discusses his roots in labor, an agenda for Pennsylvania left elected officials, and why he plans to be an “organizer-in-chief.”
Elite universities like Harvard and Penn are using their tax-exempt status to rob public coffers blind. The solution is easy: tax them.
From fighting contract concessions to making common-good demands like postal banking and public broadband, Canadian postal workers’ fighting unionism should be an inspiration to USPS workers.
Despite his “working-class Joe” schtick, Joe Biden has often sided with big business over the labor movement. But his changes in the National Labor Relations Board may allow union organizers new opportunities to rebuild labor. It’s up to us to take advantage before the window closes.
Too many anti-racist efforts today obsess over individual actions like microaggressions. We need to fight racism in a collective project rooted in shared material interests — as the United Packinghouse Workers of America did in its heyday.
Maida Springer isn’t a household name even among trade unionists and labor historians. But she was a lifelong union member and organizer who was committed to using unions to improve black people’s lives in the United States and Africa.
We talk with historian Matt Karp about how ending our great age of inequality will take a renewed working-class politics.
The Disney cartoonists and animators’ strike that began at a California studio on May 29, 1941, forever changed the labor standards of an industry — and inspired cultural workers to take greater ownership over their labor.
The Philadelphia union leader Wendell Young III straddled the worlds of the labor movement born out of the New Deal and the social movements of the New Left. He believed that uniting these two worlds in struggle could transform the United States.
Labor has suffered defeat after defeat in recent years, especially when it comes to the steady expansion of state-level right-to-work bills. But earlier this month, the state of Montana bucked that trend — by defeating right-to-work.
Workers’ pensions have been under attack for decades in the United States, so the passage of pension relief for over a million workers as part of the latest COVID-19 relief bill is a welcome development. Now we need to fight to defend and expand pensions for all workers.
We can’t win and carry out a Green New Deal without winning building trades workers and unions to an environmentalist agenda that also benefits them. New York’s recently announced massive investment in offshore wind, high-speed rail, and more, backed by both labor and environmental groups, shows how it can be done.
In his first presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to bring back manufacturing jobs with good pay. Those promises were empty. But Democrats haven’t been much better on industrial policy recent decades. Socialists need to fight for a real industrial policy.
Donald Trump tries to portray himself as pro-worker. Nowhere is this absurdity better exposed than in the decisions of his National Labor Relations Board, which have over and over again favored bosses rather than workers.
The USPS is under assault at the very moment we need a functioning postal service to hold a free and fair election. We can defend electoral democracy by defending the post office.
Thinking about racism as some kind of existential “original sin” that will always be with us no matter what we do, no matter what efforts we undertake to fight it, is a political dead end. Through organizing, we have struck blows against racism in the past — we can do so again today.