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unions

  • 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. 

  • 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). 

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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."

  • 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. 

  • 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.

  • 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. 

  • 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

  • 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?