Please join us this Thursday in NYC for a roundtable discussion with experts on China, India, Japan, and Russia, hosted by the India-China Institute at the New School. Moderator: Jeff Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s professor of History, University of California at Irvine; …
When unionized oil workers at the Tesoro Golden Eagle plant in Martinez, California walked off the job on February 1 to demand safer working conditions, they received some unexpected company on the picket line. Since the beginning of the strike, …
Belabored talked with Ai-jen Poo talk about her new book, The Age of Dignity, her work organizing domestic workers, how care work is undervalued, and how racism and sexism contributed to the crisis in caring labor.
On Thursday, February 12, I walked into Massachusetts Hall with thirty-three other Divest Harvard members and began a twenty-four-hour sit-in outside Harvard President Drew Faust’s office. Amidst the intensity, chaos, stress, and excitement of those hours, I learned an enduring …
The success of Ava DuVernay’s Oscar-nominated film Selma has created the impression that the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march was the defining civil rights story of 1965. As a result, we haven’t paid the attention we should to the event with which Selma …
On January 7, the literary event everyone was expecting did not occur. Indeed, the long-awaited publication of Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, Soumission—which envisions, in 2022, the second round of a French presidential election opposing Marine Le Pen, leader of the …
U.S. oil workers are are on strike, in the largest walkout since 1980. Belabored talked with Steve Garey, president of United Steelworkers local 12-591 in Mount Vernon, WA, about worker safety, the decision to strike, and what’s at stake.
The hopes and fears of leftists around the world following Syriza’s dizzying victory last week can best be summed up by a famous scene on the TV show Saved by the Bell where the episode’s heroine, Jesse Spano, takes too many caffeine …
To kick off our new Q&A series, Booked, Tim Shenk talks to historian Daniel Immerwahr about “a left that can operate on all scales.”
The “suspension bridge” of top income shares (based on the work of Thomas Piketty and colleagues) is by now a familiar icon of American inequality. In this rendering, top-end inequality (measured as the share of national income going to the …
President Obama’s forceful comments on the need for federal support of child care programs were one of the most notable aspects of his recent State of the Union address. As he said, “It’s time we stop treating child care as …
What does the decline of stable working-class jobs mean for the working-class family? Belabored asks Andrew Cherlin, author of a new book, Labor’s Love Lost, on the rise and fall of the nuclear family in America, and how the workplace shapes our family life.
The Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday is one of the few in the United States that invites us to strike a reflective pose. Each year communities volunteer in massive service projects, children don their Sunday best and memorize great works of …
Here, Richard McGuire’s spare and insular foray into the comic-art world, eludes any easy categorization.
Belabored talked to historian Joshua Freeman about how police and their unions fit within the labor movement, and the political contradictions of uniformed officers getting organized.
