Who Killed Obamacare?
Why did the ACA—the first substantial expansion of the U.S. welfare state in nearly half a century—fail to win over the constituency it deserved?
Fall 2024
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How Immigrants Built the American Left—And Can Build It Again
For nearly two centuries, immigrants have been among the U.S. left’s most important partisans. As a new mass movement comes into being, they must again be at the heart of it.
Why Labor Moved Left
After decades of defeat, organized labor has become the domain of reluctant radicals.
Two Roads Forward for Labor: The AFL-CIO’s New Agenda
An early defeat and a year-old victory have put energy and urgency into the effort by American trade unionists to launch what AFL–CIO president Richard Trumka has declared a “new strategic initiative.”
A New Era for Wal-Mart Workers?
There is no such thing as a spontaneous strike, protest, or any other kind of social irruption. Spontaneity is just another word for ignorance on the part of those in power who are the object of subaltern scorn and protest.
Can This Election Save the Unions?
It now seems like ancient history: the few weeks between Barack Obama’s election in November 2008 and the onset, after the inauguration, of intransigent, increasingly successful Republican opposition to his entire program. That was a moment in which hostility to …
Tragedy in the Fields: The Self-destruction of the United Farm Workers 
Most people think that farm work in the vineyards and fields of California is unskilled labor, largely undifferentiated work in which an army of Mexican-born migrants follow the harvest northward from the border as the fruits and vegetables ripen with …
Reply: How Being Troublesome Pays Off
Lichtenstein Replies to Dubofsky
Labor’s Role in the Obama Era: A Troublesome and Unreliable Ally?
Lichtenstein: Labor in the Obama Era
Why American Unions Need Intellectuals
Sixty years ago, in The New Men of Power, C. Wright Mills made a perceptive observation about the troubled relationship between labor leaders and radical intellectuals during an era of cold war militarism and conservative advance. Wrote Mills: To have …
Obama’s First Year: Why He Deserves a More Enthusiastic Endorsement from the Left
N. Lichtenstein: Why Obama Needs the Left
Lemon Socialism or Lemonade
N. Lichtenstein: Lemon Socialism or Lemonade?
Labor and the New Congress: A Strategy for Winning
A labor victory in the new Congress depends on the definition of what it means to win. Labor’s broad agenda is passable in almost inverse relationship to that agenda’s capacity to strengthen the institutional and political power of trade unionism …
The United Auto Workers: Vanguard or Rearguard?
John Barnard’s American Vanguard: the United Auto Workers During the Reuther Years, 1935-1970, and Jonathan Cutler’s Labor’s Time: Shorter Hours, the UAW, and the Struggle for American Unionism
Union Strategies
In her review of my State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (“A Dearth of Inspiration,” Spring 2002), Daphne Eviatar offers a tough-minded critique of a book she labels “utopian” and out of touch with “political reality.” She …
