Departments

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strikes

  • 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: Black Perspectives
    10/4/2021

    Black Women, Sanderson Farms, and the Strike for Better Conditions

    by Derrion Arrington

    200 Black women poultry processing workers in Mississippi led a 1979 strike for safer conditions and protection from arbitrary actions by their all-white supervisors; they won, but their story highlights issues of labor exploitation and racism that still characterize the industry. 

  • 9/6/2020

    On Labor Day, Think of Bread and Roses

    by William Lambers

    On Labor Day, remember the demands of striking textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Working people deserve more than bare subsistence; they're entitled to dignity and pleasure too.

  • 6/21/2020

    The Great Upheaval of 1877 Sheds Light on Today’s Protests

    by Richard Schneirov

    1877 saw a wave of mass protests and strikes by the urban poor of multiple ethnicities, violent repression by the forces of law and order, and a news media that focused on sensational instances of looting and property damage while ignoring the protesters' complaints about inequality during a brutal economic downturn.

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    4/30/2020

    The Coronavirus Could Rewrite the Rules for Silicon Valley

    by Margaret O'Mara

    The blue-collar workers who power the digital economy — including fulfillment center workers and app-based couriers — are pushing for higher pay and better protection, just as Detroit autoworkers did 90 years ago.

  • 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: The Activist History Review
    8/27/19

    Graduate Worker Organizing is Scholarly Praxis

    by Hannah Borenstein

    For many inside and outside of academia the notion that graduate students are indeed workers is not readily clear. In large part, I came to see this as mirrored through the reproduction of academia’s lack of emphasis on scholarly praxis.

  • Why Ports Are the New Factories

    by Louis Hyman

    Crane at the Port of Long Beach in Long Beach, California. Credit: Wiki Commons.Last month, union activists across the country celebrated what they saw as the latest opportunity to kickstart the moribund labor movement: a strike at Walmart on Black Friday. Retail workers, or as Walmart calls them, "associates," across the country were to walk out on the greatest shopping day of the year. The walkout was to signal the national unity of retail workers and strike a blow that would stagger the giant from Bentonville. At the same time, it would galvanize liberal consumers who would support the walk-out by their refusal to shop. Bringing together consumers and workers, they believed, would force America's largest retailer to the negotiating table.It failed.Walkouts were erratic. Shoppers, most of whom were hard-pressed workers themselves, thought more about the presents under the tree than the picket lines, if there were any. It turns out, as one might expect, that coordinating a walkout at thousands of locations across the country was hard, even in this age of social media.