From Refinery Town to Progressive City
In Richmond, California, grassroots activists have turned their local government into a bulwark against corporate interests. Can their story be replicated around the country?
Fall 2024
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Liberals Against Democracy
The resurgence of ugly, authoritarian nationalism has renewed a strain of anti-democratic commentary among allegedly enlightened intellectuals. But this retreat to elitism will only empower the demagogues.
Is Labor a Commodity in Wisconsin?
A recent decision by a Wisconsin judge should help unions by asserting that “labor is a commodity,” an argument that marks a U-turn for labor’s advocates.
The High Toll of Fast Fashion
The True Cost vividly documents the labor and environmental cost of our cheap clothes. The challenge it poses is direct: how can we stop this? But a deeper question remains: which “we”?
Kirstin Downey’s The Woman Behind the New Deal 
The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience by Kirstin Downey Random House, 2009, 480 pp. $35 As the nation debates once again proposals to guarantee health insurance for …
Losing Ground: Another Look at Made in L.A.
An inspiring if flawed documentary, Made in L.A. follows three Los Angeles sweatshop workers as their lawsuit against a low-price retail label and the community campaign to support them developed from 2001 through 2004. Enthusiastically received by critics and activists …
No Sweat: Hard Lessons from Garment Industry History
This Thanksgiving 2006 will witness the anniversary almost to the day ninety-seven years ago, when the immigrant shopgirls of New York’s shirtwaist factories called a general strike. This past April, and then on May Day, immigrant workers, 120 years after …
