Workers in the Great Depression were beaten down but desperate for change. When a militant new labor federation, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, raised their sense of political possibility, they seized the opportunity and unionized en masse.
Weeks before the door plug blew out of an Alaska Airlines flight over Portland, Oregon, on January 5, grounding more than 150 Boeing aircraft, workers at the part’s reported manufacturer had been warning of safety concerns — but management ignored them.
Former university presidents Elizabeth Magill and Claudine Gay were no friends of Palestine. In fact, they suppressed free speech and equated solidarity efforts with antisemitism.
Emmanuel Macron has appointed 34-year-old Gabriel Attal as France’s new prime minister. The bid to give his government a new progressive face suffers one big problem: French people haven’t forgotten its deeply anti-social record.
From HIV/AIDS to COVID-19, the pharmaceutical industry has made obscene profits by exploiting public research and denying lifesaving medication to poor countries. Building a fairer system of medicine production means breaking Big Pharma’s power.
Austerity policies originated with efforts by economic elites to crush working-class power and redistribute income upward after World War I. That history demonstrates the need for democratic control over economic policy to defend workers’ interests.
At his funeral last week, former European Union chief Jacques Delors was hailed as a left-wing architect of the EU. But far from realizing the Left’s hopes for a “social Europe,” in the 1990s Delors built a new European order in thrall to free-market dogmas.
Elon Musk is trying to export Tesla’s anti-union model to Sweden, and workers across Scandinavia are launching solidarity actions to thwart him. We should be embracing the Nordic countries’ model of strong worker rights, not Tesla’s elitist union busting.
The United Auto Workers’ strike last fall saw the union renew its militancy and win big victories on behalf of worker control. The historic walkout suggests the possibility of a broader revival of class struggle and the ideal of economic democracy.
Last year’s catastrophic East Palestine train derailment has spurred calls from a rank-and-file labor group for public ownership of rail infrastructure. We spoke to an expert about what that could look like in the US, which is dominated by for-profit rail.
In 1871, elite British writers were horrified by the threat to the bourgeois social order that the Paris Commune represented. But their working-class counterparts expressed profound sympathy for the Communards and their revolutionary aspirations.
In Canada’s New Gilded Age, CEOs are enjoying record pay, earning a worker’s average yearly salary by the morning of January 2. It doesn’t have to be this way.