unions 
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SOURCE: Labor and Working Class History Association
5/4/2022
The Laundry Workers' Uprising and the Fight for Democratic Unionism
by Jenny Carson
African American and Black Caribbean immigrant women were key organizers of New York laundry workers who pushed for a union movement that rejected divisions of occupation, race and nationality in favor of workplace democracy.
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SOURCE: The Baffler
4/21/2022
Union Organizing in the Long Shadow of the Gilded Age
by Daisy Pitkin
On listening to Andrew Carnegie's "The Gospel of Wealth" in Pittsburgh's Carnegie Library as librarians perform the kind of social services Carnegie deplored (and try to organize a union, which he deplored more).
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SOURCE: The American Prospect
4/14/2022
New NLRB Cases Seek to Overturn Anti-Worker Precedents
The new cases would address the ability of employers to force employees to attend anti-union meetings, prevent employers who committed unfair labor practices to use delay tactics to avoid recognizing a union, and close a loophole that would allow employers to refuse to recognize unions.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
4/14/2022
Amazon Labor's Union Shows "Woke Capital" Still Uses Racism to Divide Workers for Profit
by Adam Serwer
"Amazon’s defeat is also notable for another reason: the victory of a diverse group of workers against a mighty corporation that has presented itself as racially egalitarian."
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SOURCE: Labor and Working Class History Association
4/4/2022
With Amazon Union, What's Old is New Again
by Rosemary Feurer
The victory of the Amazon Labor Union in Staten Island doesn't represent a revival of "the 1930s insurgency," but a new generation finding guidance from some of the bottom-up solidarity building strategies from that decade. Today's unionism will have to avoid some mistakes of the CIO to endure.
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SOURCE: Labor and Working Class History Association
4/4/2022
The Amazon Union Vote is a Win for Hope
by Ian Rocksborough-Smith
"Despite historically low unionization rates, recent polls suggest at least 2/3 of Americans approve of labor unions – the highest approval rating since 1965. The ALU seems to have come along at exactly the right moment."
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SOURCE: NBC News
4/4/2022
How Did Amazon Workers Win a Union? Look Back 100 Years
by Kim Kelly
The radical Black waterfront worker and organizer Ben Fletcher established a model of a democratic, antiracist, integrated labor union on Philadelphia's waterfront that echoes in the worker-led victory in establishing a union at Amazon's Staten Island warehouse.
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SOURCE: Dissent
3/28/2022
Baseball's Labor War
by Peter Dreier
Organizing the Brotherhood of Professional Base-ball Players in 1885, John Montgomery Ward asked whether team owners could treat their players as chattel through the "reserve clause." Today's players seem to be learning some similarly radical lessons from the recent owner's lockout.
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SOURCE: The 1A
2/9/2022
The Biden White House Lends Support to Right to Organize a Union
Labor historian Erik Loomis discusses the release of a pro-union report by the White House Task Force on Worker Orgainzing and Empowerment.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
2/7/2022
Biden Administration Offers Blueprint for Union Growth
Labor historian Erik Loomis argues that the Biden Administration's plans for executive action are a long-overdue nod to the needs of American workers, but legislation is needed because the next Republican administration can reverse course.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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?
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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.
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