On February 19, Wal-Mart announced that it would raise its minimum wage to $9. The following week, Wisconsin, the home of labor progressivism, passed right-to-work legislation. What’s going on? Some analysts believe that Wisconsin’s action is a harbinger of things …
On Thursday, November 13, port truckers struck at the nation’s largest ports, Los Angeles and Long Beach, demanding an end to misclassification and wage theft. It was the fourth strike in a campaign initiated by the Teamsters and Change to …
David Bensman: The Continuing Global Financial Crisis
The current collapse of Countrywide, Bear Stearns, and commodities speculator MB Global has finally prompted the Federal government to begin re-regulating financial markets. Yet, it is doubtful that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, President George Bush, …
In 2005, China experienced more than seventy five thousand public protests in rural villages and urban factories. These bursts of discontent appear to have made a deep impression on China’s party leaders. As in nineteenth-century Europe, the specter of revolution …
Irving Howe invited me to write for Dissent in 1972, when I was a graduate student. My main qualification was my participation in a socialist youth group. This was one of Dissent’s first moves toward generational reconciliation, but given my …
Half a dozen years ago Americans rediscovered the failure of their public schools. A series of governmental and foundation reports warned that the mediocrity of elementary and secondary school education endangered America’s competitiveness in the global economy. There was little …
America declared “war on poverty” twenty-five years ago, yet in most inner-city neighborhoods conditions are worse now than they were then. In the years since Michael Harrington opened an innocent nation’s eyes to the sorry reality of “the other America,” …
Lester Thurow’s The Zero-Sum Society (Basic Books, 1982) provoked a storm of protest from liberals and leftists who charged that Thurow’s emphasis on the need for economic growth represented an abandonment of concern for working people and the poor. Apparently …
The American labor movement is being battered by tides of change. Union membership as a proportion of the total work force is down; relative wages are declining; hard-won work rules are being surrendered; and employers are sowing the seeds of …
Things are grim in South Chicago. Two years ago, Wisconsin Steel went bankrupt, leaving 4,000 steelworkers without jobs, pension plans, and their last paycheck. Then Pullman Standard closed, after United Steelworkers of America District Director Jack Parton’s frantic efforts to …
Whether labor unions are good for America is now controversial. A decade ago John Kenneth Galbraith’s analysis that unions were a necessary “countervailing power” was widely accepted, but recently corporate America has legitimated a new paternalism. Today liberals, radicals, conservatives, …
During the 1970s, European socialists grew dissatisfied with the welfare state they had built, despite the prosperity and security it brought to European society. In the Swedish Social Democratic party of Olaf Palme, the French Socialist party of Francois Mitterrand, …
Lillan Rubin’s World of Pain is a moving study of working-class families, written from socialist and feminist perspectives. In sympathetic prose, Rubin conveys the frustration and anxiety that pervade the lives of the 100 men and women from Northern California …
The coal strike of 1977-78 resulted in a serious defeat for the United Mine Workers’ Union. After a remarkable display of solidarity, the miners returned to work on March•27 dissatisfied and discouraged. The final contract gave them a 37 percent wage increase spread over three …
