Departments

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labor

  • SOURCE: The Nation
    1/11/2022

    Healthy Democracies Don't Scapegoat Their Teachers

    "The failure to confront authoritarianism and the failure to defend public schools and educators from Covid is the same failure. When an institution is a cornerstone of democracy, you fight for it, you fund it, and you respect it."

  • SOURCE: Labor and Working Class History Association
    12/13/2021

    Exchange: The Violence of Work

    by Emily E. LB. Twarog

    A group of labor historians consider whether violence – manifested in workplace injury and death – is an inevitable part of capitalist labor relations. 

  • SOURCE: Dissent
    10/4/2021

    The "Eds and Meds" Sector Needs a New Deal

    by Ian Gavigan and Jennifer Mittelstadt

    COVID has given university administrators license to escalate their war on unionized labor in all facets of operations, from instruction to food services. All university workers need to recognize their common interest and organize to make universities pay living wages, offer fair benefits, and support equitable community development.

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    5/26/2021

    How Cruelty Became the Point of Our Labor and Welfare Policies

    by Gail Savage

    The persistence of Malthusian thinking in social welfare debates is leading to policies that create needless suffering and a corrosion of the common bonds of humanity that sustain a society.

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    5/3/2021

    A New Deal, This Time for Everyone

    The New Deal emphasized that American democracy must be healthy for its economy to enjoy legitimacy, and vice versa. It's time, says NYT editor Binyamin Appelbaum, to extend that commitment to the economic participation of women. 

  • SOURCE: Slate
    5/1/2021

    FDR’s Second 100 Days Were Cooler Than His First 100 Days

    by Jordan Weissmann

    The first 100 days of the New Deal could be described as disaster response. The second 100 days, according to historians William Leuchtenberg, Erich Rauchway and David Kennedy, were when the administration took steps that transformed labor relations and birthed a modern social welfare state. 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    4/14/2021

    How Domestic Labor Became Infrastructure

    Writer Moira Donegan argues that including funding for care workers in the infrastructure bill is eminently reasonable; feminist intellectuals for decades have argued that this work is essential to the broader economy, so funding it and supporting it makes sense economically and to recognize the labor of women. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    3/17/2021

    Manufacturing Isn’t Coming Back. Let’s Improve These Jobs Instead

    by Gabriel Winant

    Instead of focusing on infrastructure projects, the federal government should act to improve the pay and working conditions of medical and care workers, who have been a growing share of the American working class for decades. This would make poorer and older Americans healthier as well. 

  • SOURCE: Talking Points Memo
    3/8/2021

    A Living Wage Should Be A Constitutional Right

    by John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco

    "It is time we invert John F. Kennedy’s famous dictum (“Ask not what your country can do for you …”) and ask what can the country do for us?"

  • SOURCE: Folklife
    3/1/2021

    “Making a Living by the Sweat of Her Brow”: Hazel Dickens and a Life of Work

    by Emily Hilliard

    "Hazel’s song catalog is often divided into separate categories of personal songs, women’s songs, and labor songs. But in her view and experience, these issues all bled together; her songs address struggle against any form of domination and oppression, whether of women, workers, or herself."

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    2/18/2021

    ‘There’s No Natural Dignity in Work’

    by Ezra Klein

    Is it time to revisit the basic premise of American welfare policies that encouraging or requiring paid labor is the best way to deal with poverty? 

  • SOURCE: Bartlett Annual Review
    1/28/2021

    How Will the Pandemic Shape the Future of Work?

    by Judy Stephenson

    The pandemic is exposing the historical contingency of "jobs" as opposed to "tasks" – as capital returns to a piecework model in the gig economy, the concept of job security is in danger of vanishing. 

  • SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
    1/26/2021

    ‘Despised’ Review: The Left and the Working Class

    by Jonathan Rose

    Historian Jonathan Rose reviews a book by British firefighter and "left conservative" Paul Embery which identifies the collapse of both working class communities and open debate in Britain as factors in the demise of Labour as a political force.