labor 
-
SOURCE: The Nation
3/24/2023
Why LAUSD Teachers Walked Out
At the heart of the walkout of 60,000 education professionals is the reality that the school district's policies are keeping teachers and students in poverty that makes it harder to teach and learn, says a union official.
-
3/26/2023
ChatGPT Wants to Join SEIU in Breakthrough for Organized Labor
by Jim Castagnera
Business owners looking to replace workers with automation beware; ChatGPT is a union bot.
-
SOURCE: TeenVogue
3/22/2023
Graduate Student Strikes Fight Back Against Decades of Austerity, Seek to Revive Opportunity
Participants in these actions explain that the goal isn't only pay and benefits for graduate student workers, but returning public higher education to a state of accessibility for millions of students and opportunity for millions of workers after decades of budget cuts and privatization.
-
SOURCE: Peste
2/21/2023
Can a "Return to Normal" Happen Without Repairing Sociability?
by Nate Holdren
The push to return to many pre-pandemic modes of working and living is taking place without sufficient provision for mitigating risk, and with seriously damaged bonds of trust and mutual support; people are again in proximity to each other, but far from being together.
-
SOURCE: Yes!
1/26/2023
Why We Need Pirates
by Paul Buhle, Marcus Rediker and David Lester
Though vilified in popular culture, the history of piracy shows that many crews were egalitarian bands of maritime workers escaping their exploitation at the hands of merchant companies and navies. A new graphic adaptation of a recent history of piracy tells the story.
-
SOURCE: Nature
1/11/2023
UC Strike is Energizing a Movement of Research Workers
Collective actions at the University of California campuses and elsewhere are influencing research workers to view the work that they do in the lab as labor.
-
1/15/2023
Revisiting Kropotkin 180 Years After His Birth
by Sam Ben-Meir
The rise of automation and the concurrent squeeze of workers in the name of profit offer an opportunity to revisit the ideas of Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin as a forward-looking critique of power.
-
SOURCE: The New Republic
12/8/2022
The University of California is Also a Landlord
The system, which approximates a real estate investment firm that also confers degrees, is squeezing its graduate students both as their wage-payer and as a large-scale landlord that contributes to a housing market that is unaffordable to graduate assistants and postdoctoral researchers.
-
SOURCE: New York Magazine
11/30/2022
Railway Companies Aren't Simply Being Stingy: Denying Sick Days is Central to their Business Model
The regime of Precision-Scheduled Railroading (PSR) has yielded immense profits but cannot accommodate unexpected worker absences. The current impasse is happening because executives and stockholders refuse to abandon the system.
-
SOURCE: Google
11/30/2022
An Open Letter from Historians In Support of Railway Workers
A group of historians hopes to persuade President Biden and Labor Secretary Martin Walsh to uphold railroad workers' right to strike and to intervene in negotiations to help secure a contract with sick day provisions.
-
SOURCE: Yale Daily News
11/27/2022
Grad Workers: Choose Solidarity with New Haven
by Adom Getachew and Sarah Haley
Two former Yale PhD students argue that the university's graduate student union offers not just benefits and protection to graduate student workers, but the chance for them to work in solidarity with other university and New Haven workers across the vast racial and socioeconomic divides separating city and campus.
-
SOURCE: TIME
11/28/2022
Can the UC Strike Remake Higher Education?
The strike is driven by the crises in both academic labor and housing costs, which make poverty wages for graduate student workers far less tolerable than they used to be. Historian James Vernon is one faculty member cancelling his classes in solidarity.
-
SOURCE: The New Yorker
11/29/2022
What's at Stake in the UC Grad Strike
by Jay Caspian Kang
While public support for unions has grown in recent years, it's not clear if the public understands that the working class is now likely to be involved in knowledge work. The strike by University of California graduate workers hopes to change that.
-
SOURCE: The New Republic
11/29/2022
The Cultural Workers Go On Strike
A "black turtleneck uprising" of museum workers and adjunct professors tells us that brain work has become gig work, challenging cherished myths about education, opportunity and meritocracy.
-
SOURCE: NextCity
11/18/2022
Will the Philadelphia Museum Strike Change an Industry?
Will the success of the Philadelphia Museum of Art workers' strike help push more museums toward paying livable wages to their workers?
-
SOURCE: Defector
11/15/2022
48,000 UC Academic Workers Striking: You Can't Eat Prestige
"Without its armada of researchers and grad students, the UC system is essentially a baroque real estate scam." Those workers argue they deserve much more from the system in exchange for the labor that makes it run.
-
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
11/9/2022
Will an Academic Worker Strike Tarnish University of California System?
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion, argue the L.A. Times editors, that the University of California system must make wage concessions to allow their graduate student workers to afford housing anywhere near their campuses.
-
SOURCE: The New Yorker
10/12/2022
The Selective Politics of the "Learning Loss" Debate
by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Discussions of the disruption to learning caused by COVID-related school closures often ignore the endemic inequalities in American education and exposure to harm from COVID, and sideline the voices of teachers who have been sounding the alarm about the dangerous state of their facilities for years.
-
SOURCE: Jacobin
9/2/2022
Bosses Know Why Workers are "Quiet Quitting"
Workers are doing more for less, and have been for decades. Industry knows this; they're worried that workers are beginning to understand it, too.
-
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
8/27/2022
Sorry Zoomers, Gen X Invented the "Quiet Quit"
"Strivers, grinders and hustlers hate them, but quiet quitters, slackers and work-to-rulers are treasured antiheroes in American folk culture."
News
- House Hearings on Campus Speech Show Different Perceptions of the Problem
- Mark Russell, DC's Piano-Playing Political Satirist, Dies at 90
- Trans Texans, Fearing Violence Inspired by Legislation and Rhetoric, Look to Armed Self-Defense
- How Paris Kicked out the Cars
- Vatican Repudiates "Doctrine of Discovery" that Justified Colonialism by Catholic Nations