Newest Labor
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- Sunday, Feb 07, 2010
ZNet Article Organized labor and its allies are rightly alarmed over the high incidence of on-the-job accidents that have killed or maimed many thousands of workers. But they haven’t forgotten nor should we forget the on-the-job violence that also afflicts many thousands. -
- Thursday, Feb 04, 2010
ZNet Article For two weeks in January Belgian brewery workers blocked roads, set fire to beer crates, kidnapped managers and handed out free beer as part of their tactics against job cuts proposed by Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world’s largest brewer. The company announced the cuts in spite of profits of $1.55 billion in the third quarter of 2009. -
- Monday, Feb 01, 2010
ZNet Article Scott Brown’s January 19 defeat of Martha Coakley in the race to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat has been greeted as a “game changer†for Barack Obama and his political backers. This GOP victory has deprived Democrats of their “filibuster-proof†super-majority in the Senate, making Obama’s health care plan—at least, in its current form--the most high-profile casualty of Coakley’s loss. -
- Saturday, Jan 23, 2010
ZNet Article The Senate Democrats loss of a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority seems almost certain to doom attempts to revive the barely functioning National Labor Relations Board, the country's chief labor law administrator and enforcer. -
- Friday, Jan 01, 2010
ZMag Article November 11 direct actions in support of fired workers -
- Sunday, Dec 27, 2009
ZNet Article The underpaid, overworked and otherwise poorly treated airport screeners who are essential to air passenger safety may finally be winning their long struggle for the badly needed union rights guaranteed other federal employees. -
- Tuesday, Dec 22, 2009
ZNet Article While attention to class has ebbed and flowed among social movements for generations, class rule was always present and the recent economic crisis has forced it back into the spotlight. But what is class rule and why is it important? -
- Monday, Dec 21, 2009
ZNet Article Despite the importance of unions in our lives, our schools pay only slight attention to their importance  or even to their existence. -
- Saturday, Dec 19, 2009
ZNet Article Ageism can strike anyone once they reach a certain age -- sometimes as early as 40 -- and it can make the victim feel unwanted, unneeded and oppressed by all in this work and youth oriented society. -
- Monday, Dec 14, 2009
ZNet Article The terrain of "progressive labor" in the U.S. has shifted dramatically in recent years. The two-million member Service Employees International Union (SEIU)--long associated with the remaking of labor as a force for social justice--has become embroiled in a series of controversies that have alienated past campus, community, and political allies. A union that once commanded almost automatic support in left-liberal circles now finds many "friends of labor" arrayed against it, rhetorically at least, and, in some cases, actively assisting organizational rivals such as UNITE HERE and the new National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). The following article reviews the history of the labor-intellectual alliance that emerged in the mid-1990s, in response to changes in the national AFL-CIO leadership. It assesses the current state of relations between labor-oriented academics and leading unions that formed the Change To Win coalition in 2005. ZNet Article In her new book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, Barbara Ehrenreich traces the origins of contemporary optimism from nineteenth-century healers to twentieth-century pushers of consumerism. She explores how that culture of optimism prevents us from holding to account both corporate heads and elected officials. -
- Tuesday, Dec 08, 2009
ZNet Article The United States has more than 15 million people unemployed. This is not their fault. It is the fault of really bad policy decisions by people who get paid more than almost all of the unemployed ever did or ever will. The failure of economic policy makers to recognize and attack an $8 trillion housing bubble led to the downturn. The continuing failure of economic policymakers to think creatively is why 15 million people remain unemployed. -
- Tuesday, Dec 01, 2009
ZNet Article Book review: Clean clothes. A global movement to end sweatshops by Liesbeth Sluiter -
- Monday, Nov 30, 2009
ZNet Article Of all the ideas out there on how to pull us out of the economic mess we’re in, none makes more sense than the program laid out by the AFL-CIO and a coalition of civil rights groups and other organizations. -
- Thursday, Nov 19, 2009
Commentary It's Nov. 19, 1915, in a courtyard of the Utah State Penitentiary in Salt Lake City. Five riflemen take careful aim at a condemned organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, Joe Hill, who stands before them straight and stiff and proud. ZNet Article Worker Occupations And The Future Of Radical Labor: An Interview With Noam Chomsky by the IWW. -
- Tuesday, Nov 17, 2009
ZNet Article The unemployment rate is 10.2 percent and virtually certain to rise even higher in the months ahead. Even with the prospect of extended benefits, unemployment is still a crisis for the families affected, as they struggle to pay their mortgage or rent and cover other essential expenses. Millions will end up falling behind, losing their home - in some cases leading to homelessness and/or family break-ups. -
- Monday, Nov 09, 2009
ZNet Article There is a major national ad campaign, funded by the oil industry and other usual suspects, to convince the public that measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and slow global warming will result in massive job loss. This ad campaign warns of slower growth and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, possibly even millions of jobs, if some variation of the current proposals being debated by Congress get passed into law. -
- Saturday, Nov 07, 2009
ZNet Article Nothing is more basic to our democratic society than the principle of majority rule. But what if the eligible voters who fail to cast ballots were automatically recorded as voting "no"? -
- Friday, Nov 06, 2009
Commentary A panel presentation given today, Friday November 6th, 2009 at the 7th international Rethinking Marxism conference, held at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. -
- Tuesday, Nov 03, 2009
ZNet Article I met Jose Hernandez, a leader of the Mexican Union of Electricity workers (SME) at a metro station called Obrera (Worker), unsurprisingly located in a working class area of Mexico city, and from there we walked back to his house.
“I'm very tired, I'm exhausted,†he said, smiling, as he made me tea. “I haven't stopped for days.â€
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- Sunday, Oct 25, 2009
ZNet Article Sam Gindin interviewed by PSAC's Our Union Voice -
- Friday, Oct 23, 2009
ZNet Article Twenty years ago, 60,000 workers from New York City to Maine rallied against healthcare cost-shifting at the telecom giant then known as NYNEX (since "rebranded" as Verizon). -
- Thursday, Oct 22, 2009
Commentary The postal workers' struggle is as vital for democracy as any national event in recent years. The campaign against them is part of a historic shift from the last vestiges of political democracy in Britain to a corporate world of insecurity and war. If the privateers running the Post Office are allowed to win, the regression that now touches all lives bar the wealthy will quicken its pace. A third of British children now live in low-income or impoverished families. One in five young people is denied hope of a decent job or education. -
- Thursday, Oct 15, 2009
ZNet Article Did you know about the Bush administration's rotten treatment of the air traffic controllers whose work is essential to air safety? That controllers were forced to work long, fatiguing shifts with little time to rest? That many quit because of that? Were you aware of the great potential for serious accidents that posed? - All Newest Labor
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Featured ZNet Labor
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- Sunday, Feb 07, 2010
ZNet Article Organized labor and its allies are rightly alarmed over the high incidence of on-the-job accidents that have killed or maimed many thousands of workers. But they haven’t forgotten nor should we forget the on-the-job violence that also afflicts many thousands. -
- Monday, Feb 01, 2010
ZNet Article Scott Brown’s January 19 defeat of Martha Coakley in the race to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat has been greeted as a “game changer†for Barack Obama and his political backers. This GOP victory has deprived Democrats of their “filibuster-proof†super-majority in the Senate, making Obama’s health care plan—at least, in its current form--the most high-profile casualty of Coakley’s loss. -
- Tuesday, Dec 22, 2009
ZNet Article While attention to class has ebbed and flowed among social movements for generations, class rule was always present and the recent economic crisis has forced it back into the spotlight. But what is class rule and why is it important? -
- Monday, Dec 14, 2009
ZNet Article In her new book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, Barbara Ehrenreich traces the origins of contemporary optimism from nineteenth-century healers to twentieth-century pushers of consumerism. She explores how that culture of optimism prevents us from holding to account both corporate heads and elected officials. -
- Thursday, Nov 19, 2009
ZNet Article Worker Occupations And The Future Of Radical Labor: An Interview With Noam Chomsky by the IWW. -
- Tuesday, Nov 17, 2009
ZNet Article The unemployment rate is 10.2 percent and virtually certain to rise even higher in the months ahead. Even with the prospect of extended benefits, unemployment is still a crisis for the families affected, as they struggle to pay their mortgage or rent and cover other essential expenses. Millions will end up falling behind, losing their home - in some cases leading to homelessness and/or family break-ups. -
- Sunday, Oct 25, 2009
ZNet Article Sam Gindin interviewed by PSAC's Our Union Voice -
- Thursday, Oct 08, 2009
ZNet Article Mass firings at Kraft Foods' plant in Argentina sparked protests throughout the nation, and ignited a new wave of worker organizing. In August, Kraft fired 160 workers after they went on strike to demand proper health measures at the company's factory in suburban Buenos Aires during the swine flu epidemic in Argentina. Most of the fired workers were active union members; almost all of the factory's union delegates were fired. ZNet Article Review of: Healing Together: The Labor-Management Partnership at Kaiser Permanente, by Tom Kochan, Robert McKersie, Adrienne Eaton, and Paul Adler (Cornell ILR Press, 2009). -
- Sunday, Sep 20, 2009
ZNet Article As those conservative protesters were leaving Washington, members of the country's largest body of unions, the AFL-CIO were arriving in Pittsburg for their annual convention. They elected the former coal miner Richard Trumka to be their new President and heard from the man they had worked hard last year to send to the White House. - All Featured ZNet Labor
ZMag Labor-
- Monday, Feb 01, 2010
ZMag Article Remembering a labor organizer/strategist, author & ecologist -
- Friday, Jan 01, 2010
ZMag Article November 11 direct actions in support of fired workers -
- Friday, Dec 04, 2009
ZMag Article An interview with Hong Kong labor leader Cheung Lai-Ha -
- Thursday, Oct 01, 2009
ZMag Article The economic crisis for those at the bottom of the ladder -
- Tuesday, Sep 01, 2009
ZMag Article Activism in and repression of Iran's unions ZMag Article NYC transit worker & labor leader discusses union activism -
- Wednesday, Jul 01, 2009
ZMag Article Chicago's six-year strike by UNITE HERE Local 1 ZMag Article Cutting back work time for leisure and the planet ZMag Article Right wing class war and "countersubversion" -
- Monday, Jun 01, 2009
ZMag Article The NUHW and SEIU split and the future of unions - All ZMag Labor
Comments on Labor-
- Saturday, Feb 06, 2010
  Forum Post Putting aide the private sectors multi-billion dollar muscles which would resist the government taking away potential profits from them, are there areny other problems with these ideas?Unfortunately, the answer is: plenty."Even a modest contribution could make a large difference in the retirement security of most workers. For example, at a 3 percent rate of return, a worker who saved $1,000 a year for 35 years would be able to get an annuity of $4,200 a year at age 65."If inflation is 3% per year then the real return is zero. Or is the proposal to have it pay 3% above the inflation rate? This isn't clear.Either way it's not stated how the funds would be invested, and where they would be invested.In the stock of private companies? Do we really want our federal government's program depending on the success of private for-profit companies' profits being as maximal as possible (often at the expense of worker's salaries, environmental protection etc) so that the government would have an additional (on top of existing) movitation to "back off" from protecting workers rights or the environment lest too many companies profits suffer and the returns of this proposed program suffer.Worse, workers themselves would have yet another (on top of our IRAs, 401(k) etc) hook into supporting corporate profits...give us individually another reason (on top of the many existing) to be pushed to "back off" anything that ever, somehow, maybe possibly hurts profits or even so much as hurts profit growth, or else risk our very survival and well-being at retirement, our ability to meet our basic needs, be threatened by such a move.Yet another problem is the "radical" idea that is nevertheless being more and more widely recognized over time, that Wall Street itself cannot continue indefinitely, nor any other system, continue indefinitely, which violates basic physics 101 and violates basic arithmetic - that is, a system based on exponential growth (or for that many any other growth) continuing forever and ever. The Dow Jones itself for example would need to be at the level of 1,000,000 at the end of this century, just to give annual returns of a few percent (it would have to be much higher were we to expect annual growth at the historical level of close to 10%)IF we're going to send money to the government and expect a guaranteed return, there is a more basic solution: expand and increase social security.While we're at it, let's make it less regressive and better funded at the same time by ending the cap which lets the super-rich pay a far lower percent into the system than the rest of us. Making social security a flat tax would be a step forward compared to the worse-than-flat current regressive financing.A racially-more-democratic, long-term vision aligned with the values and politics of Z magazine might be more along the lines of a set of embryonic proposals at the Alternatives To Wall Street project page,http://economicdemocracy.org/alternatives-to-wallst.htmlwhere the inter-related proposals by Paul Glover (creator of Ithaca Hours, PhilaHealthia, proposer of WISE, Whole Ithaca Stock Exchange, and more) and my own proposals for a transition to Democratic Retirement Systems, are housed. DISCLAIMER: the "embryonic" above means that among other things a solution is not yet incorporated into these proposals to escape from the same "can't growth exponentially forever" problems alluded to above - except partially though some proposed clauses - these proposals do however take us a huge step towards not only economic sanity but also economic democracy and away from the Corporate Feudalism or corporatocracy that we have today with humanity enslaved to corproate interests - corporations whose very existence we need to challenge, as Chomsky and others remind us.We are under no illusions that the above can be implemented in the short term; the ideas shoudl be vigorously explored and experimented with while we take more "reformist" steps in the meantime, in parallel. Such reformist approaches would include not the government requiring me to put $1,000 extra per year for them to invest in Microsort or Walmart stock or these companies corporate bonds, but rather an expansion of the existing Social Security but made more financially robust and more finaincially secure with better funding by eliminating the regressive current cap. -
- Thursday, Feb 04, 2010
Forum Post Grazie a te. Soprattutto grazie degli estratti su Zinn. Io non avevo fatto in tempo a trovare qualcosa che fosse tanto significativo. -
- Wednesday, Feb 03, 2010
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- Wednesday, Jan 27, 2010
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- Monday, Jan 25, 2010
- All Comments on Labor
Featured ZMag Articles Fitz: 30-Hour Week?
Cutting back work time for leisure and the planet
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Labor WritersLabor Blogs
Blog Post The current situation is marked by two notable factors… Video Asia and US crisis... Commentary Progressive activists and writers continually bemoan the fact that the news they generate and the opinions they express are consistently ignored by the mainstream media, and thus kept from the masses of the American people. This disregard of progressive thought is tantamount to a definition of the mainstream media. It doesn't have to be a conspiracy; it's a matter of who owns the mainstream media and the type of journalists they hire - men and women who would like to keep their jobs; so it's more insidious than a conspiracy, it's what's built into the system, it's how the system works. The disregard of the progressive world is of course not total; at times some of that world makes too good copy to ignore, and, on rare occasions, progressive ideas, when they threaten to become very popular, have to be countered. Video Ashley Smith of the International Socialist Organization speaks about the devastating earthquake in Haiti ZNet Article Two recent books on the future, both seeking to interpret selected aspects of a rapidly moving, technologically complex world, are each deeply flawed but well worth examining for what's missing. ZNet Article The Golden Rule is in danger. No, not the famed ethical code -- though proponents of selfishness certainly have ignored it -- but a thirty-foot sailing ship of the same name that rose to prominence about half a century ago. ZNet Article The country faces a serious crisis in the form of a manufactured crisis over the budget deficit. This is a crisis because concerns over the size of the budget deficit are preventing the government from taking the steps needed to reduce the unemployment rate. This creates the absurd situation where we have millions of people who are unemployed, not because of their own lack of skills or unwillingness to work, but because people like Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke mismanaged the economy. - All Labor Blogs
Featured Video
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- Saturday, Jan 24, 2009
Video Bill Fletcher - Author of "Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and A New Path Toward Social Justice" speaks at United Healthcare Workers 2008 Leadership Conference. (Part 1 of 2) -
- Saturday, Dec 13, 2008
Video Interview on Obama, Chicago workers strike, and more... -
- Tuesday, Oct 23, 2007
Video Barbara Ehrenreich gives the graduating class of 2007 a realistic look at what's in store for them in the post-college world. Please visit her new organizations website which advocates for the shrinking middle class: www.unitedprofessionals.org. - All Featured Video
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