- 15 Years Ago, Mad Men Quietly Began Its Engagement With Leftist Ideas (7/4/2022) - The prestige drama Mad Men, which ran for seven seasons, beginning fifteen years ago this month, received plenty of awards and close readings from mainstream critics. The Left press largely slept on it, which is a shame: the series was not only very funny and poignant and offered viewers a lot to chew on about the changing politics and gender roles of the 1960s, but seemed to draw direct inspiration from socialist thought. Series creator… …
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- The Amazon Union Campaign Won By Following the Lead of Workers (4/4/2022) - Jeff Bezos has been brought back down to Earth. No boss is invincible. The workers at Staten Island’s JFK8 Amazon fulfillment center proved it by beating the massively rich and powerful corporation 2,654 to 2,131 in a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election on April 1. Meanwhile, a rerun election campaign by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) at Amazon’s Bessemer, Ala. facility remains too close to call when challenged ballots are considered. That the workers in Staten Island organized themselves into… …
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- Happy Striketober. Let’s Restore the Legal Right to Strike. (10/20/2021) - The United States is experiencing a wave of worker militancy and a White House administration that actually wants to take concrete actions to defend and grow labor unions. That strange sensation you’re feeling is optimism about labor’s prospects, reflected in the giddiness of #Striketober. Let’s take this opportunity to restore the legal right to strike. A moment in which tens of thousands of workers are on strike — at John Deere, at Kellogg’s, at Warrior Met Coal—might seem like a strange time to talk about a “right”… …
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- What we owe gig workers (5/28/2021) - Labor advocates and allies in Albany are feuding over a draft bill that aims to grant some union rights to precarious workers who toil at irregular hours and less regular wages for app-based “gig” employers like Uber and Lyft. This family feud is all the more frustrating because there’s a perfectly reasonable New Deal-era state law still on the books for when workers slip through the cracks of a patchwork of worker protections and fissured… …
- “The Amazon Workers in Bessemer Would Already Have Their Union If We Had the PRO Act” (5/6/2021) - The April union election loss at an Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama has been treated in the media as a signal event for the labor movement in the Biden era. But what exactly it signaled remains subject to debate. Kim Kelly is a freelance writer who covered the Amazon election on the ground for More Perfect Union. Shaun Richman, program director at SUNY’s labor center, previously directed the American Federation of Teachers’ charter school organizing division. Here… …
- A Brief History of the U.S. Government’s Targeting of Left-Wing Immigrants (9/3/2020) - On September 8, 1947, federal agents walked into the midtown Manhattan office of the Hotel, Restaurant & Club Employees & Bartenders Union Local 6 and arrested its president for being an “undesirable alien.” Michael J. Obermeier had been organizing hotel workers into a succession of scrappy independent unions since he arrived in New York as a German immigrant around the time of the first World War. By the time of his arrest, he led 27,000… …
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- If “Cancel Culture” Is About Getting Fired, Let’s Cancel At-Will Employment (7/29/2020) - [This article was co-authored with Moshe Marvit.] You know what should be canceled? The legal right of most bosses to fire you for a “good cause, bad cause, or no cause.” That status quo is so widely accepted that some progressives don’t think twice about appealing to the authoritarian power of bosses in the pursuit of social justice: Many high profile social media campaigns have been employed to get people who are caught on video committing racist… …
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- The Powerful Movement To Micromanage and Defund Public Schools Has Been Awfully Quiet About Police (7/10/2020) - Police are violently suppressing street protests across the country in mutiny against community demands for democratic accountability and respect for human rights. Their brutal rejection of basic demands for greater oversight and penalties has fueled larger demands for defunding police departments, if not outright abolition and replacement with other bodies. In this context, some activists are calling for a crackdown on police unions, which they say protect police from democratic accountability. That these calls are… …
- Yes, Unemployment Insurance and Welfare Encourage People to Quit Lousy Jobs. That’s the Point. (5/22/2020) - Do we have a right not to work? The answer is we don’t if Democratic leaders stubbornly try to keep the “era of big government” confined to the 20th century. Think of a barista right now in Georgia. She’s home collecting unemployment and watching her two kids while the schools and the cafe where she worked are closed. Her boss says they’re reopening next week even as the coronavirus continues its deadly spread, but schools won’t. Governor Kemp, along with other… …
- Kick the Boss Out of the Doctor’s Office (5/15/2020) - Is the ability to negotiate healthcare benefits with employers a source of strength for unions, or an insidious trap? The Covid-19 health crisis and ensuing economic meltdown probably answers that question, but it’s still worth dissecting for those naive optimists who think there is some semblance of the old normal that we can return to when the pandemic is finally behind us. Medicare for All was a central issue in the Democratic presidential primary. Among… …