- “So Long, Dental Plan!” Unions, Labor Relations and Class Struggle…As Seen On TV (11/11/2024) - And now for something...not entirely, completely different. I've signed a contract with SUNY Press to deliver a collection of essays next year for publication in 2026. Call for Proposals “So Long, Dental Plan!” Unions, Labor Relations and Class Struggle…As Seen On TV Edited by Shaun Richman Subject Fields Labor Studies, Film and Film History, American Studies, Humanities, Political Science, Popular Culture Studies, Social Sciences Synopsis Stories about unions and class struggle are notoriously under-represented in… …
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- Searching for Ludwig Lore (9/12/2023) - I'm back in FOIA hell. Some time in the last decade, the FBI began methodically transferring the dead case files of dead Communists to the National Archives and Records Administration. This is a disaster for scholarship on American Communism. If the FBI retains a file, they quickly review it to redact the names of agents and spies and then email you a pdf at no cost to you. If NARA possesses the file, they put… …
- “Why should we worry about organizing groups of people who do not want to be organized?” (8/1/2023) - The AFL and CIO merged in 1955, and union organizing–particularly measured by union win rates in NLRB elections–began a long, slow decline. Although the labor movement in New York City took an additional four years to unite, when they finally did they pioneered new organizing in the public sector and health care–pointing the way towards a labor movement that could survive Reagan and worse. I could–and probably will–keep writing different versions of this lede. This… …
- Making Sense of the 1950’s Teamsters (7/31/2023) - The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations merged in 1955, with big talk and high hopes for organizing the remaining non-union strongholds in the nation's economy. Three years later, they were laying off organizers on staff and settling into a routine, on the way to a long, slow decline towards a loss of power, influence and bargaining power. In New York City, though, the newly merged federation approached new union organizing with… …
- The Specificity/Universality of Sinead O’Connor (7/27/2023) - To the extent that casual music fans (which is to say, most people) know her, it's as a "one-hit wonder" whose best known song was a cover. It happened to be written by the legendary artist Prince, whose own songwriter demo of "Nothing Compares 2 U" didn't get released from his vaults until after his untimely death, largely because her performance of it made it hers. Sinead O'Connor was a hell of a songwriter in… …
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- Teh Socials (7/25/2023) - The ignominy of remaining on Elon Musk's Twitter is becoming too much. As luck would have it I got an invite for Bluesky on the day that the Chief Twit renamed his hopelessly broken, hilariously over-leveraged former public square, "X." John Scalzi wrote a pissed-off and slightly elegiac blog post about the community that many of us have lost through this one idiot billionaire's "emperor has no clothes" debacle, and how and when to disentangle… …
- Back On My Bullshit (7/17/2023) - Hello, Internet. I'm blogging again. Or possibly not. I'm starting to re-work my website, in anticipation of my next book. My first website, hosted on a comrade's server, probably began around 1998. I called it "Why Did Shaun Richman Create This Homepage?" and mostly used it to store pictures, audio files, an occasional written piece for a couple of years. In 2005, I took a break from union work and revamped the website to try… …
- 2018 Year in Review: A Tweet Thread (12/28/2018) - First, a little cheat. @MosheMarvit & I landed an op-ed in the @nytimes a few days before New Years last year.American Workers Need Better Job Protections https://t.co/qZwf2VdmSL— Shaun Richman (@Ess_Dog) December 27, 2018 …
- That Time I Was (Willingly) on Fox News (5/9/2018) - On a slow news day in March of 2002, I was the token socialist for a roundtable segment on the "O'Reilly Factor." I think they destroyed the tape, because I haven't been able to find it on any transcription service. When Fox News still handled this stuff themselves, they claimed there was 12 hours of missing footage from the day - conveniently including the live show and its late-night re-run. Anyway, with some help I… …
- Next Stop (4/20/2018) - I was on the 1 train today, riding from Whitehall (South Ferry) to SoHo. There were a bunch of high-acheiving high school nerds trading notes on AP courses and SAT prep. As the train pulled out of the Rector St. station, one of them misheard the conductor's garbled "Next Stop!" announcement and gasped, "Wait, is that open now?" Confusion, as every part of this conversation was initially misunderstood by each other: Kid 2: "What, no.… …