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working class history



  • Three Paths for Labor after Amazon

    by Harmony Goldberg and Erica Smiley

    The organizers of the Staten Island Amazon union mobilized a broad sense of justice politics not limited to the workplace. It remains to be seen how they can win allies in labor and the government to continue to organize against a wealthy and hostile company. 



  • Is the PATCO Era Ending?

    by Joseph A. McCartin

    Forty years ago, Ronald Reagan's handling of the air traffic controllers' strike enshrined the era of union-busting. Can labor start to recover now? 



  • The Age of Care (Review of Gabriel Winant's "The Next Shift")

    by Nelson Lichtenstein

    Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein says Gabriel Winant's book on the rise of the care industry is the story of community change in the last 50 years, with union retiree health care dollars reabsorbed by capital through the treatment of diseases of despair provoked by deindustrialization (with care provided by a workforce of women and people of color).



  • Interview: A Rich Man's War, A Poor Man's Fight

    Historian Keri Leigh Merritt, interviewed about the history of labor organizing in the South, links the history of Southern policing to the maintenance of exploitative labor practices after the Civil War and explains how the fight to unionize Amazon's Bessemer, Alabama facility extends the politics of the Civil Rights Movement.



  • The Triangle Fire and the Fight for $15

    by Christopher C. Gorham

    The Triangle Shirtwaist fire inspired workplace safety regulation and advanced the cause of organized labor. It's time to remember the victims with a commitment to a federal living wage law.



  • “Making a Living by the Sweat of Her Brow”: Hazel Dickens and a Life of Work

    by Emily Hilliard

    "Hazel’s song catalog is often divided into separate categories of personal songs, women’s songs, and labor songs. But in her view and experience, these issues all bled together; her songs address struggle against any form of domination and oppression, whether of women, workers, or herself."



  • The Wages of Whiteness (Review Essay)

    Hari Kunzru's review essay examines the current vogue for white antiracism (and antiracist training) through the history of whiteness as a political and academic concept, concluding that many  of the most popular books and multicultural pieties strip the idea of its structural elements and reduce it to a question of personal purification. 



  • Malcolm Chase, 1957-2020

    The social historian Malcolm Chase rejected “the enormous condescension of posterity” often to be found in history written by the educated rich.