labor 
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SOURCE: Defector
3/3/2023
The Police Aren't Part of Change in Chicago
by Dan Berger
A historian critiquing a recent book on Black Lives Matter argues that the political, fiscal and cultural influence of police is so broad that it's impossible to think of meaningful social reform in a society that includes modern police departments.
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SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
4/25/2023
U. of Michigan Faculty Shouldn't Flatter New President while the Administration Busts Unions and Politicians Trash Higher Ed
by Silke-Maria Weineck
Top administrators increasingly share with conservative politicians a "desire to refashion universities in the image of the American workplace, where at-will employees do what they’re told by feudal overlords who have poems commissioned in their praise."
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SOURCE: NextCity
4/20/2023
The 4-Day Work Week is an Idea Whose Time Has Come (Again)
While workers have long expressed a preference for a shorter work week, the labor market issues of the COVID pandemic have recalibrated the balance of power between workers and management in ways that have made the idea more appealing to policymakers.
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SOURCE: The Guardian
4/25/2023
Labor Secretary Nominee Julie Su Shaped by Work on 1990s Sweatshop Trafficking Case
With a prominent record of advocating for immigrant workers, Su faces indifference or outright hostility from moderate Democrats and Republicans as her nomination to succeed Marty Walsh at the Department of Labor advances.
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SOURCE: The Nation
4/19/2023
Rutgers Strikers Ran the Table; Is This the Way out of Higher Ed's Crisis?
by Jonathan David
Three Rutgers unions, representing instructors in different professional positions, won by modeling the kind of solidarity that university workers need to fight back against the privatization and corporatization of public higher education.
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SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
4/17/2023
Rutgers Unions Suspend Strike after Big Gains
Although unions representing graduate workers, lecturers, and full-time faculty must approve them, a framework for agreement has been reached that would deliver significant gains in wages and other demands.
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SOURCE: Harper's
4/15/2023
Beyond Quiet Quitting: The Real Crisis of Work
by Erik Baker
Impressionistic accounts of worker withdrawal and labor militancy both fail to capture a deeper issue: Work is failing to deliver on the promises the state has made as an avenue of meaning and fulfillment.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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