[VIDEO] On “The Rick Smith Show” Discussing Mamdani, Strikes
Op-Ed: Mamdani Is Right To Side With The Nurses
Mayor John Lindsay famously faced a massive citywide strike of bus and subway workers as his first challenge in office. The Transport Workers Union Local 100 contract expired at the stroke of midnight on Jan. 1, 1966, just as Lindsay was sworn in. The strike was finally settled 11 days later, with union leaders jailed at Lindsay’s insistence for leading an “illegal” work stoppage.
Legendary TWU president Mike Quill suffered an ultimately fatal heart attack in prison, after wishing the judge who did Lindsay’s bidding “drop dead in his black robes.”
This is what some in the press have suggested towards Mayor Mamdani, who has joined with the 15,000 nurses striking against three big hospitals. Continue reading “Op-Ed: Mamdani Is Right To Side With The Nurses”
Review of “The Pandemic and the Working Class: How US Labor Navigated COVID-19” for H-Sci-Med-Tech
It is sometimes said that there are decades in which not much changes and years in which an entire decade’s worth of sociopolitical tumult occurs. The so-called COVID year, March 2020 until the vaccine rollout of the following year, is an example of the latter. The COVID year markedly reduced average American life expectancy, nurtured extremist politics and conspiracy-minded cynicism, frayed communities, and eroded trust in institutions.
For workers who, in the words of Nick Juravich and Steve Striffler, were briefly “elevated from disposable to ‘essential,’” the period led to an uptick in worker self-organizing, new wage demands and concessions on work-from-home flexibility, some successful union organizing, and a nearly impossible amount of worker protest to fully quantify, including “quiet” and actual quitting. “Not in nearly a century had so many people felt the failure of government and indifference of the bosses so quickly and so deeply, on a scale and with an intensity that was difficult to ignore.” Continue reading “Review of “The Pandemic and the Working Class: How US Labor Navigated COVID-19” for H-Sci-Med-Tech”