labor

• 
• SOURCE: Nature
  1/11/2023
  

  UC Strike is Energizing a Movement of Research Workers

  Collective actions at the University of California campuses and elsewhere are influencing research workers to view the work that they do in the lab as labor. 

• 
• 1/15/2023
  

  Revisiting Kropotkin 180 Years After His Birth

  by Sam Ben-Meir

  The rise of automation and the concurrent squeeze of workers in the name of profit offer an opportunity to revisit the ideas of Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin as a forward-looking critique of power. 

• 
• SOURCE: The New Republic
  12/8/2022
  

  The University of California is Also a Landlord

  The system, which approximates a real estate investment firm that also confers degrees, is squeezing its graduate students both as their wage-payer and as a large-scale landlord that contributes to a housing market that is unaffordable to graduate assistants and postdoctoral researchers. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Magazine
  11/30/2022
  

  Railway Companies Aren't Simply Being Stingy: Denying Sick Days is Central to their Business Model

  The regime of Precision-Scheduled Railroading (PSR) has yielded immense profits but cannot accommodate unexpected worker absences. The current impasse is happening because executives and stockholders refuse to abandon the system. 

• 
• SOURCE: Google
  11/30/2022
  

  An Open Letter from Historians In Support of Railway Workers

  A group of historians hopes to persuade President Biden and Labor Secretary Martin Walsh to uphold railroad workers' right to strike and to intervene in negotiations to help secure a contract with sick day provisions. 

• 
• SOURCE: Yale Daily News
  11/27/2022
  

  Grad Workers: Choose Solidarity with New Haven

  by Adom Getachew and Sarah Haley

  Two former Yale PhD students argue that the university's graduate student union offers not just benefits and protection to graduate student workers, but the chance for them to work in solidarity with other university and New Haven workers across the vast racial and socioeconomic divides separating city and campus. 

• 
• SOURCE: TIME
  11/28/2022
  

  Can the UC Strike Remake Higher Education?

  The strike is driven by the crises in both academic labor and housing costs, which make poverty wages for graduate student workers far less tolerable than they used to be. Historian James Vernon is one faculty member cancelling his classes in solidarity. 

• 
• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  11/29/2022
  

  What's at Stake in the UC Grad Strike

  by Jay Caspian Kang

  While public support for unions has grown in recent years, it's not clear if the public understands that the working class is now likely to be involved in knowledge work. The strike by University of California graduate workers hopes to change that. 

• 
• SOURCE: The New Republic
  11/29/2022
  

  The Cultural Workers Go On Strike

  A "black turtleneck uprising" of museum workers and adjunct professors tells us that brain work has become gig work, challenging cherished myths about education, opportunity and meritocracy. 

• 
• SOURCE: NextCity
  11/18/2022
  

  Will the Philadelphia Museum Strike Change an Industry?

  Will the success of the Philadelphia Museum of Art workers' strike help push more museums toward paying livable wages to their workers? 

• 
• SOURCE: Defector
  11/15/2022
  

  48,000 UC Academic Workers Striking: You Can't Eat Prestige

  "Without its armada of researchers and grad students, the UC system is essentially a baroque real estate scam." Those workers argue they deserve much more from the system in exchange for the labor that makes it run. 

• 
• SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
  11/9/2022
  

  Will an Academic Worker Strike Tarnish University of California System?

  It is difficult to avoid the conclusion, argue the L.A. Times editors, that the University of California system must make wage concessions to allow their graduate student workers to afford housing anywhere near their campuses. 

• 
• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  10/12/2022
  

  The Selective Politics of the "Learning Loss" Debate

  by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

  Discussions of the disruption to learning caused by COVID-related school closures often ignore the endemic inequalities in American education and exposure to harm from COVID, and sideline the voices of teachers who have been sounding the alarm about the dangerous state of their facilities for years. 

• 
• SOURCE: Jacobin
  9/2/2022
  

  Bosses Know Why Workers are "Quiet Quitting"

  Workers are doing more for less, and have been for decades. Industry knows this; they're worried that workers are beginning to understand it, too. 

• 
• SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
  8/27/2022
  

  Sorry Zoomers, Gen X Invented the "Quiet Quit"

  "Strivers, grinders and hustlers hate them, but quiet quitters, slackers and work-to-rulers are treasured antiheroes in American folk culture."

• 
• SOURCE: Athletic Director U
  8/1/2022
  

  The Power 5 Conferences Should Split Revenues with College Football Players

  by Victoria Jackson

  Another college football season means another chance to demand that universities and the NCAA recognize a fundamental fact about the dangerous and isolating work performed by players: they are not student-athletes, but employees of the football team. 

• 
• SOURCE: Jacobin
  6/27/2022
  

  The Labor Upsurge Calls Us to Rethink Organizing Rules

  by Chris Brooks

  Do the successes of organizers at Amazon and Starbucks mean the age of slow, methodical and gradual organizing is over? Can workers use a union vote itself as an organizing tool to move quickly and defeat union-busting? 

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  6/8/2022
  

  Anti-Sweatshop Crusader Charles Kernaghan, 74

  Kernaghan waged war against the dark side of free trade: the ruthless exploitation of workers in overseas factories. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Drift
  6/9/2022
  

  The Dark Underside of the "Family-Like" Business

  by Erik Baker

  The history of businesses cloaking their labor practices in paternalism is long; the most recent chapter dates back to the spiritual explorations of the 1960s counterculture and the surveillance practices of Henry Ford. 

• 
• 6/12/2022
  

  Should the USPS Honor the Sabbath, or Amazon?

  by Rebecca Brenner Graham

  A Pennsylvania postal worker's lawsuit claims religious discrimination because he was scheduled to deliver Amazon packages on Sunday. The history of Sunday mail service shows the case is about anxiety over power in society as much as religious obligation.