unions

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• SOURCE: Jacobin
  1/11/2022
  

  Teachers’ Unions Are Making Totally Reasonable Pandemic Health and Safety Demands

  by Josh Mound

  Chicago's teachers, like those elsewhere, have led the way in making demands for students to return to safe classrooms. The media are scapegoating them for the failures of politicians to meet or even consider those demands, while advancing a privatization agenda.

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• SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
  11/29/2021
  

  A New Force in American Labor: Academics

  A member referendum in the United Auto Workers could make the union more amenable to direct democracy, and potentially make academic workers a major power bloc in the union. 

• 
• SOURCE: NPR
  11/29/2021
  

  The Rise and Fall (And Rise?) of Labor

  Historian Erik Loomis discusses whether the wave of labor activism will start to reverse a half-century of successful union busting by big business. 

• 
• SOURCE: Marketplace
  9/28/2021
  

  Unions Gain Traction in the Restaurant Industry-Again

  David Whitford and Dorothy Sue Cobble discuss the ways that workers in the restaurant industry hope to revive the high representation of food service workers by unions that prevailed in the 1950s

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  9/6/2021
  

  Too Few Today Remember the Bloody Uprising of Miners at Blair Mountain

  In a region still marked by rampant inequality, the public forgetting of the Battle of Blair Mountain seems like a concerted effort to suppress working people's history. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Hill
  9/2/2021
  

  There's No "Labor Shortage," Just a Shortage of Wages and Worker Protection

  by Lane Windham

  American workers, especially women, aren't being lazy. They're taking part in an unrecognized general strike against low wages, inadequate childcare, and dangerous workplaces made more dangerous by COVID. 

• 
• SOURCE: Economic Policy Institute
  8/25/2021
  

  A Century After Blair Mountain, the Right to Organize is as Vital as Ever

  by Dave Kamper

  "In many mining regions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mine companies for all practical purposes were the government."

• 
• SOURCE: Jacobin
  8/20/2021
  

  The Contemporary US Right’s Roots in 1930s Union-Busting: Interview with Kathryn Olmsted

  The New Deal's support for labor rights pushed the large California agricultural interests, who previously embraced "big government" irrigation projects, to an aggressive anti-statist position based in keeping control over their workplaces and their profits. 

• 
• SOURCE: The American Prospect
  8/5/2021
  

  Is the PATCO Era Ending?

  by Joseph A. McCartin

  Forty years ago, Ronald Reagan's handling of the air traffic controllers' strike enshrined the era of union-busting. Can labor start to recover now? 

• 
• SOURCE: HuffPost
  6/17/2021
  

  Amazon’s Greatest Weapon Against Unions: Worker Turnover

  Labor historians Nelson Lichtenstein and Joe McCartin say that Amazon's corporate turn against retaining employees reverses longstanding business strategies because it makes organizing unions extremely difficult. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  4/15/2021
  

  Why the Amazon Workers Never Stood a Chance

  by Erik Loomis

  "We may be in a period where economic justice concerns are more central to our politics than any time since the mid-20th century. But without a new round of labor law reform, organized labor cannot succeed."

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  4/12/2021
  

  America Needs to Empower Workers Again (Opinion)

  by Paul Krugman

  Times columnist Paul Krugman argues that the decline of labor was a political outcome; reviving unions requires changing the rules governing management during a union drive, but is a key to alleviating inequality.

• 
• SOURCE: WNYC
  3/31/2021
  

  What a Unionization Effort in Alabama Could Mean for the Labor Movement

  Historian Keri Leigh Merritt discusses the Amazon unionization vote in the context of southern labor history.

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• 3/30/2021
  

  The Bessemer, Alabama Amazon Union Election Campaign

  Historians look at the just-concluded union election campaign at Amazon's Alabama facilty and await the results. 

• 
• SOURCE: Financial Times
  3/29/2021
  

  The Ultimate David and Goliath Fight in Alabama

  The effort to organize Amazon Workers in Bessemer, Alabama may succeed if it connects the cause of labor to broader civil rights issues that resonate with the local Black community and echo the involvement of Martin Luther King in struggles for workers and economic justice, say historians Keri Leigh Merritt and Michael Innis-Jiménez. 

• 
• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  3/25/2021
  

  Can a Grand Bargain Empower Amazon’s Workers and Limit Corporate Power?

  by Nelson Lichtenstein

  "Unions are weaker today than they were in the 1930s, but the idea that wages have to rise and democracy has to be revitalized, in the workplace and beyond, is returning in an echo of that era."

• 
• SOURCE: Talking Points Memo
  2/1/2021
  

  Why Biden’s Forceful Endorsement Of Labor Is The Strongest From A POTUS In Decades

  Labor historians Karen Sawislak and Erik Loomis discuss how Joe Biden's endorsement of freedom of workers to form a union (without mentioning Amazon in particular) goes against decades-long trends in the political power and cultural esteem of labor unions. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Guardian
  2/23/2021
  

  'We Deserve More': An Amazon Warehouse’s High-Stakes Union Drive

  Historians Joseph McCartin, Michael Innis Jiménez, and Kerri Leigh Merritt discuss the historic union drive at Amazon's Bessemer, Alabama center and where it fits in the history of labor and civil rights in the south. 

• 
• SOURCE: The New Republic
  2/8/2021
  

  The Alabama Town That Could Defeat Jeff Bezos

  The industrial suburb of Bessemer has a long history as a rare center of union activity in the South and now is the focal point of an effort to organize Amazon's warehouse workers. Historian Robin D.G. Kelley, who has written about interracial labor militancy in Alabama, gives context. 

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• SOURCE: Labor and Working Class History Association
  12/14/2020
  

  Civil Rights Unionism and Democracy for Teachers

  by Jesse Chanin

  Nat LaCour connected civil rights unionism to teachers’ struggle to build union democracy. A remembrance and evaluation.