Independent Unions Can Help Break Through the Economic Crisis and Labor’s Paralysis
In a period of extreme social and economic crises, when the major labor unions have reduced their organizing programs to a fraction of what they once were and the courts stand athwart any effort to protect workers’ interests, scrappy new independent unions raise hope against hope that maybe — just maybe — workers can fight back and win. I’m writing, of course, about the early 1930s. A newly published book finds some surprising parallels between that era and our own. An eleventh volume in the prolific Marxist labor historian Philip S. Foner’s History of the Labor Movement in the United States has just been published, after it was discovered that Foner had completed the manuscript before he died in 1994. Subtitled The Great Depression 1929–1932, the book covers a period in which the established unions of the American Federation of Labor were not conducting many organizing campaigns or strikes and […]
15 Years Ago, Mad Men Quietly Began Its Engagement With Leftist Ideas
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 Matthew Weiner tipped his hand that Mad Men would at least play with Marxist critiques of capitalism in the very first episode with two simple words: “It’s toasted.” That advertising slogan is prominently featured in a classic mid-century Marxist text, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order by Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy. In an age when supermarket shelves were newly and fully stocked with competing technicolor boxes of breakfast cereal and the […]
When Labor Fought Rock-and-Roll
Facing the world ain’t easy when there isn’t anything going Standing at the corner waiting watching time go by Will I go to work today or shall I bide my time So begins the Kinks’ song, “Get Back in Line,” one of the most hauntingly beautiful paeans to the forced idleness and stress of unemployment ever committed to tape. I’ve turned to this song for solace, a little too often for comfort, but I’ve always been discomfited by the refrain that follows. ‘Cos when I see that union man walking down the street He’s the man who decides if I live or I die, if I starve, or I eat Then he walks up to me and the sun begins to shine Then he walks right past and I know that I’ve got to get back in the line Is this just Ray Davies being a contradictory crank? He has, […]
The Other Chicago Teachers’ Strike
As the countdown to the Chicago Teachers Union’s October 11 strike deadline approaches, another teachers’ union in Chicago has voted to authorize a strike as their own contract negotiations have dragged on over strikingly similar disagreements. The teachers and staff at the fifteen-campus UNO Charter School Network (UCSN) have spent seven months bargaining for a successor to their groundbreaking first collective bargaining agreement. But talks with management have stalled. So this week, all but one of the 533 bargaining unit members participated in the strike vote, which delivered a 96 percent vote in favor of strike authorization. The teachers want to limit class size, reverse layoffs of student support personnel, and win more say over the school-year calendar. USCN executives want to shift more pension and health-care costs onto the workers, consolidate the pay schedule, and limit support staff to a 1 percent raise. “We sympathize with the CTU, we […]
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 […]
One Day Longer
As the massive strike at Verizon enters its second month with no end in sight, the stakes — for the workers, the company, and the broader labor movement — are rising. Even mainstream media outlets like the New York Times have taken note, casting it as something of an epochal battle over whether the economy can tolerate good jobs that actually deliver economic security and decent benefits. The strike began on April 13, when forty thousand Verizon landline workers, represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), walked out after nine months of contentious and fruitless contract negotiations. The unions are fighting employer demands to make outsourcing and offshoring jobs easier, as well as cutbacks in health benefits. Verizon isn’t budging. It opened the month of May by canceling striking employees’ health insurance — an action that was technically legal, but union […]