Month: June 2016

Making Abortion Rights Real

The week began on a surprisingly strong note for reproductive justice advocates, as the US Supreme Court, by a 5–3 margin, overturned Texas’s draconian House Bill 2. The law, which Wendy Davis famously filibustered in her pink tennis shoes, purported to protect women’s health by requiring that health clinics providing abortion services “meet the standards for ambulatory surgical centers, including regulations concerning buildings, equipment and staffing” and that “doctors performing abortions . . . have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.” These regulations, which the Supreme Court found on Monday to be an “undue burden” for those seeking an abortion, would have shuttered half of the Texas facilities that perform abortions. Activists are rightly celebrating the ruling as a win for abortion rights. In Texas and elsewhere, women seeking to terminate unwanted pregnancies likely won’t have to contend with the anti-abortion statutes passed since the 2010 Tea Party wave. But […]

The Right to Strike Must Mean the Right to Return to Work After a Strike

With the decisive victory for union members at Verizon, 2016 is already on pace to be the second year in a row where recorded strike activity has increased over the previous half-decade. Now, a new decision from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) could restore legal job protections for striking workers, making workplace job actions a more common—and more powerful—union strategy. Workers simply do not have a meaningful right to strike if they do not have a right to return to the job when the strike is over. But, thanks to the judicial gutting of labor rights, going on strike is a high stakes proposition for American workers. Not only do striking workers lose out on pay and benefits during the strike, but they run the risk of losing their jobs entirely. So, while work stoppages are on the rise relative to the last few years, they are at historically […]

What Will It Take To Wake Up the ‘Sleeping Giant’ of the New Working Class?

The American working class has been dissed and dismissed. Our unions busted, our wages slashed, our homes foreclosed and our rents raised. We’re blamed for the rise of Trump, but otherwise do not exist in the media landscape. But the working class is a sleeping giant that is beginning to stir and will soon instigate a great campaign for racial and economic justice, according to a new book by Tamara Draut. A vice president of the liberal think tank Demos, Draut’s previous book, Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30- Somethings Can’t Get Ahead, explored the how the high cost of college, housing and health insurance, combined with stagnant wages and made the usual milestones of adulthood increasingly out of reach for millennials. Her new book, Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America, attempts to connect the dots between the struggles of those millennials and the politics of […]