labor history 
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2/6/2023
How We Brought the Radical History of Pirates to Life
by David Lester
Visual artist David Lester discusses the creative process of developing a graphic version of the radical history of piracy, a collaboration with historians Marcus Rediker and Paul Buhle.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
1/27/2023
Review: New Book Worships the False Idol of the Responsible Corporation
The idea of corporate social responsibility is an artifact of the domination of society by big business, a domination so powerful as to make alternatives exceedingly difficult to imagine. A new book internalizes that difficulty.
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SOURCE: The Nation
1/10/2023
Want to Reverse Polarization and Democratic Decline? Support Unionization
by Jacob M. Grumbach
The need for a renewed labor movement is a key component of democratic renewal that is too often ignored by Democratic strategists, says a political scientist who studies antidemocratic politics.
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SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
1/3/2023
Assessing the UC Grad Strike
by Laura J. Mitchell
Despite winning increases in wages and benefits, University of California graduate student workers still face the problem of working amid the rubble of a social contract uniting universities, students, and the public around the idea of the university as a public good.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
12/28/2022
The Think Tank Trying to Defund Public Sector Unions
Labor historian Lane Windham describes a well-funded effort to encourage union members to opt out of paying dues, a strategy designed to force their unions to do more with less. Organizing to recruit new members and energize existing ones is the way to fight back.
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SOURCE: KCRW
12/13/2022
What's Pushing White-Collar Workers Toward Unions?
Labor historian Lane Windham discusses the surge in pro-union activism among academics, journalists and other knowledge workers.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
12/14/2022
The Farm Workforce Modernization Act Raises Troubling Echoes
by Matt Garcia
The support of the United Farm Workers for the bill cuts against the organization's origins in opposition to the Bracero guestworker program, and signals its shift toward advocacy of global responsibility initiatives in the food supply chain. Other labor organizations believe the bill would reestablish indentured servitude in farm work.
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SOURCE: Yahoo
12/10/2022
Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández Teams Up with New LA City Councilors to Review City's History
A historian and two recently-elected progressive city council members teamed up to tour the sites of the city's community of Mexican revolutionaries in exile, asking how the past can inform social movements today.
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SOURCE: The Baffler
12/8/2022
"Amtrak Joe" Leaves Rail Workers in the Dust
by Kim Kelly
Why did the "most pro-union president" in modern times push through a negotiated settlement rejected by the majority of railroad union members, and what would Eugene Debs think?
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SOURCE: History Club (Substack)
12/4/2022
Qatar's World Cup Echoes Brutal American Labor History
by Jason Steinhauer
Exposés of the brutal conditions faced by migrant laborers who built Qatar's World Cup facilities echoes the history of American public works, where workers' bodies and lives were subordinated to budgets and timetables.
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SOURCE: World Socialist Website
12/5/2022
No Surprise, Historians' Open Letter on Railroad Labor Dispute Met Deaf Ears at White House
by Tom Mackaman
One labor historian finds his colleague's offer of advice to the Biden administration naive in light of the Democratic Party's (and the American state's) support for capital over labor.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
12/2/2022
The Biggest Threat to America's Stability is the Class Divide
by Kim Phillips-Fein
We mistakenly bemoan "polarization" instead of reckoning with the economic power of radical right-wing elites, who have the resources to fund growing organizations, and the growing number of people disaffected from the social order who are susceptible to their messages.
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SOURCE: The Guardian
12/5/2022
The UC Grad Worker Strike is the Most Important Labor Action in the History of Higher Ed
by Nelson Lichtenstein
The strike aims not only at raising the pay of graduate workers and postdocs, but reversing the austerity politics that have gutted California's public higher education and created a climate of precarity for intellectual workers in the system.
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SOURCE: Labor and Working Class History Association
11/19/2022
Staughton Lynd, 1929-2022
by Rosemary Feurer
Lynd was an academic and activist when those combinations were reviled as unbecoming of a professional, and he was blacklisted from the profession for his bold anti-war stance. He then made an impact as an activist for labor and against war.
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12/4/2022
Farewell, Brother Staughton
by Carl Mirra
Staughton Lynd was always in the trenches fighting for a better world, and for that he remains a “admirable radical” and, for that matter, a beautiful person.
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SOURCE: Jezebel
11/22/2022
Alabama Women, Like Predecessors, are Keeping a Strike Alive
by Kim Kelly
The Warrior Met Coal strike in Alabama has been on for more than 600 days. Labor writer Kim Kelly links miners' endurance to the work of women workers, miners' wives, and other women in past labor struggles.
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SOURCE: Labor and Working Class History Association
11/22/2022
From Solidarity to Shock Therapy: The AFL-CIO and the End of the Cold War
by Jeff Schuhrke
The AFL-CIO's leadership saw the emergence of the Polish Solidarity movement in 1980 as an opportunity to advance their anticommunist agenda. Did they also undermine the ability of a post-Soviet left to protect workers' interests against global capitalism?
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SOURCE: Contingent
11/22/2022
Postcard From Detroit
by Mattie Webb
The city of Detroit is a fitting location for an archive documenting not only American labor history but the connections between US-based unions and the antiapartheid movement in South Africa.
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SOURCE: Substack
11/17/2022
Tenured Faculty are the 18% – What Will They Do for the 82?
by Claire Potter
"Go to any faculty meeting, and you will hear what the 18% really believes: that if contract and contingent faculty deserved tenure-stream positions, they would have them."
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SOURCE: New Books Network
10/24/2022
Ahmed White: How Capital Crushed the IWW
Ahmed White's book on the IWW examines the effort to crush the radical union, and how the war on radical labor impacted free speech, political representation, and freedom of association.
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