When it comes to buying stuff online, American workers have it made. But when it comes to “mass services” — transportation, housing, education, health insurance, and childcare — American workers are getting fleeced.
It’s good that college-educated workers are unionizing. But it doesn’t tell us much about the working class as a whole.
From the earliest days of American history through the first decades of the 20th century, Americans rose up repeatedly to beat back rising food costs. They did so out of the belief that all members of the community had the right to a just price for bread.
Postwar Italy’s “escalator” system kept wages ahead of price hikes. In the 1980s, a socialist government brought it grinding to a halt — sending workers’ incomes on a decades-long downward trend.
As war rages in Ukraine, farmers have abandoned their work mid-season to take up arms against Russia. Those who stayed behind are in a race to harvest their crops before stray rockets torch their fields.
Not every 1960s folk singer was a comrade.
Children of the Weimar Republic play with devalued banknotes, 1919. Others found use for the worthless marks as wallpaper, craft and kite material, and kindling.
Crunching the numbers on the class war.
Sinn Féin is now the leading party across Ireland. But its real test will happen in power.
The widespread popular upheaval known as the “Arab Spring” ended one decade ago this year. Tunisia, whose Jasmine Revolution inspired many other demonstrations in 2011, is the only country to participate that still has an intact democracy. But even Tunisia now slouches back toward authoritarianism.
The Federal Reserve’s response to inflation is bad for workers — but it doesn’t need to be.
Beneath the strings and sequins, the Sound of Philadelphia was the backing track to the economic crisis that hit black America in the 1970s.