Cecelia sits alone in the middle of the nearly empty theater. She is wearing her old brown coat and matching hat. She holds a small bag of popcorn which she pecks at in a distracted way. But in her face …
Consider that District Council 37 had fewer than 1,000 members when Jerry Wurf took over its leadership in 1952, and that it ultimately embraced a multiethnic, multiracial mix of locals, from laborers (Local 924), to hospital employees (Local 420), Museum …
In the general election that took place in the spring of 1988, Mrs. Thatcher was eventually defeated. The dominant issue was unemployment, as it had been for two or three years prior to the election, since the end of the …
When clerical workers reached a labor agreement with Yale University last winter, the reverberations were felt throughout the country. After a 10-week strike, the 2,500 workers, most of them women, had won substantial wage and benefit improvements. At a time …
LOMÉ- Vendors crowd the unpaved streets of Lome, selling Seiko watches and unpackaged socks. One of them, a small, barefoot boy, hawks a comic book called Il y avait une fois… Eyadema—”Once Upon a Time… Eyadema.” On the book’s glossy color …
The breakthrough for the CIO and industrial unionism came at Flint, Michigan, in the winter of 1936-37. On December 30, 1936, United Auto Workers militants sat in at General Motors’ Fisher Body plants One and Two. Several weeks later, throwing …
This past spring two young Dissent writers, Mark Levinson and Brian Morton, went to Baltimore to interview Philip Van Gelder, one of the founders of the CIO and a former secretary-treasurer of the Industrial Union of Maritime and Shipbuilding Workers …
No question that human beings can ask themselves is more attractive morally than “Were we wrong?” It is a question now being insistently put to those of us who opposed the Vietnam War. The Cambodian horrors and the shameful Hanoi …
One of the most important and stimulating books on the problems of socialism written during the last few decades is Alec Nove’s The Economics of Feasible Socialism, published in 1983 by George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., London, and Allen & …
In the early 1950s, right-wing extremist groups in Israel were peripheral, their members regarded as outcasts. For example, the Zerifin underground, composed of some former fighters from Lehi (the Stern gang) and Etzel (Irgun, the Begin-led Revisionist underground), was caught …
PARIS — A deep crisis besets the French labor movement. Membership is shrinking, so is the percentage of unionists who pay dues regularly. The lifelong absorption of the rank and file in union activities is virtually gone. Gone, too, are …
Most liberal-democratic states took a long time to appreciate the juridical inventiveness of both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. Once they had perceived, among other things, the reappearance and justification of torture, their first response was to dismiss …
Notwithstanding the vigorous economic up-swing that began early in 1983 and continues at this writing, if at a slower pace, the American labor movement remains on the defensive. Its wage settlements have shrunk—in 1984, major collective bargaining contracts provided the …
Let me add a brief note to David Bromwich’s trenchant article. The more public tumult about the Holocaust, the less likelihood that the memory of its terribleness will become a serious part of human consciousness. What has been happening with …
PARIS — A deep crisis besets the French labor movement. Membership is shrinking, so is the percentage of unionists who pay dues regularly. The lifelong absorption of the rank and file in union activities is virtually gone. Gone, too, are …
