Labor Unions

Can a New Labor Movement Grow and Win with Direct Action Instead of Collective Bargaining?

by Lawrence Wittner

"In this time of growing corporate domination of the United States and of the world, William E. Scheuerman's A New American Labor Movement illuminates a useful path forward in the long and difficult struggle for workers’ rights."

Strange Beasts of Columbia

by Eduardo Vergara Torres

"According to the administration, the typical Columbia student worker must be an eyeless, toothless, infertile male creature bred on the cold shores of New England, who is about to inherit a fortune amassed by generations of well-educated ancestors."

The 20-Year Fight to Unionize Grad Student Workers

by Rebecca Nathanson

"The 3,000-person strike at Columbia University is the largest active strike in the U.S. and marks a decades-long struggle to recognize grad-student labor," as Rebecca Nathanson explains. 

Adjunct Professors Need a Better Ground Game

by Mia Brett

If universities aren’t going to invest in tenure track teaching lines, then we need to make sure that they participate in and support the professionalization of adjuncts. Statewide adjunct unionization may be the way to make that happen. 

Labor Law Is Stuck in 1947. It’s No Surprise Companies Keep Winning

The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act did what its authors hoped: tilted the balance of power back to the side of the bosses. Is momentum building for a new labor law? 

The Obscure Case That Could Blow Up American Civil-Rights and Consumer-Protection Laws

Law professor Eduardo Peñalver argues that the case of Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid which challenges a 1975 California law allowing labor organizers limited access to private agricultural land to speak to workers, could apply a radical version of the "takings" doctrine to block many kinds of labor, consumer, and civil rights law. 

The Life in "The Simpsons" Is No Longer Attainable

In the 1990s, "The Simpsons" drew humor by putting bizarre dysfunction in the context of middle class suburban banality. Today it's the idea of homeownership paid for by a stable single income that seems outlandish.

For 60 Years, This Powerful Conservative Group Has Worked to Crush Labor

by Moshe Z. Marvit

Now the Janus decision has helped push the National Right to Work Committee and its sister organizations closer to that goal.

The Thibodaux Massacre Left 60 African-Americans Dead and Spelled the End of Unionized Farm Labor in the South for Decades

by Calvin Schermerhorn

The workers created a union to defend their rights. The union died with the strikers, and the assassins went unpunished.

75 Years Ago Workers Successfully Defeated Henry Ford

by Martin Halpern

Why that’s especially worth remembering this year.

The Surprising Connection between 1930s Weather and Today's Labor Unions

In a new paper by Harvard researchers the Dust Bowl droughts of the 1930s are the reason unions are concentrated in a small number of states.