Departments

;

unions

  • 12/22/19

    Pass the Protecting the Right to Organize Act

    by Martin Halpern

    If unions and their allies win passage of this legislation, they may begin to shift the country away from the glaring inequality that is at the core of the country’s discontent. 

  • SOURCE: NY Times
    9/11/19

    The Necessary Radicalism of Bernie Sanders

    by Jamelle Bouie

    Conflict was the engine of labor reform in the 1930s. And mass strikes and picketing, in particular, pushed the federal government to act.

  • SOURCE: LAWCHA
    12-1-15

    Woodrow Wilson's other problem

    by Chad Pearson

    Three of his key supporters favored the open shop, the union-busting position of conservative business interests. 

  • SOURCE: American Prospect
    4-30-15 (accessed)

    How Gilded Ages End

    by Paul Starr

    Protecting democracy from oligarchic dominance is, once again, a central imperative of American politics.

  • 3-8-15

    This Is What Right-to-Work Means

    by Elizabeth Tandy Shermer

    “Right to work” sounds benign, if not all-American. It is in fact malignant, not just for organized labor, but also a state’s economic health.

  • SOURCE: Huff Post
    3-30-14

    New film about Cesar Chavez

    Many people thought Cesar Chavez was crazy to think he could build a union among migrant farmworkers.

  • 4-14-14

    Sharecropper’s Troubadour

    by Robin Lindley

    University of Washington historian Michael Honey on John Handcox, African American singer and labor activist in the Jim Crow South.

  • SOURCE: NYT
    6-24-13

    Jefferson Cowie: The Future of Fair Labor

    Jefferson Cowie is a professor of labor history at Cornell and the author of “Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class.”ITHACA, N.Y. — SEVENTY-FIVE years ago today, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act to give a policy backbone to his belief that goods that were not produced under “rudimentary standards of decency” should not be “allowed to pollute the channels of interstate trade."The act is the bedrock of modern employment law. It outlawed child labor, guaranteed a minimum wage, established the official length of the workweek at 40 hours, and required overtime pay for anything more. Capping the working week encouraged employers to hire more people rather than work the ones they had to exhaustion. All this came not from the magic of market equilibrium but from federal policy.For decades afterward, Congress brought more people under the law’s purview and engaged in perennial struggles to maintain or increase the minimum wage. Fifty years ago this month, John F. Kennedy signed its most important amendment, the Equal Pay Act, which guaranteed women and others equal pay for equal work....

  • Terrorism in the Workplace

    by David Patten

    Strikers in Ludlow, Colorado, 1914. Credit: Wiki Commons.In Bangladesh, more than six hundred workers died in the collapse of the Rana Plaza with hundreds more still missing and presumed dead. We must be shocked by this tragedy, but not at all surprised.