New digital technologies, particularly social media, make money by offering “free” services to users that encourage us to spend our lives on their platforms, while other tech companies try to turn work that was previously paid into play for unpaid …
For Belabored’s one-year anniversary, Michelle and Sarah talk to Saket Soni of the National Guestworker Alliance about how the conditions faced by guestworkers are spreading to more and more of the workforce. Plus: a victory for UPS workers in Queens and a labor uprising in China; the drug-testing of public employees; the fight for $15 in Seattle; and more.
Those in the West who were paying attention reacted with shock and indignation when, last month, the newly formed Ukrainian provisional government welcomed a tranche of neo-fascists into its fold. The Svoboda party’s Oleksandr Sych is now Deputy Prime Minister, …
Cecily McMillan has had trouble concentrating on the master’s thesis she is supposed to be writing this spring under my direction at the New School in New York City, a study of the political beliefs and career of the late, …
From 1964 to 1968, close to 34,000 Americans died in South Vietnam. We will never know how many Vietnamese women, men, and children perished during those years, but the total, according to most estimates, was at least one million. Among …
In
The announcement by Mahmoud Abbas that the Palestinian Authority, which he leads, is now taking steps to join fifteen international agencies has a striking parallel to events that took place in the United States fifty years ago this month. That’s when Malcolm …
Criticizing philanthropy (or philanthropists) of any kind is tricky. To most people, a negative appraisal sounds off-base and churlish—yet another instance of “No good deed goes unpunished.” Criticizing the immense private foundations that finance and shape the market-model “reform” of …
We are pleased to welcome three new editorial board members to Dissent. Leo Casey is the Executive Director of the Albert Shanker Institute as well as a long-time friend and contributor to the magazine. Sarah Jaffe is an accomplished labor …
Cross-posted from Waging Nonviolence. Although Saul Alinsky, the founding father of modern community organizing in the United States, passed away in 1972, he is still invoked by the right as a dangerous harbinger of looming insurrection. And although his landmark …
Is the era of the student athlete over? This week on Belabored, Lee Adler joins us to discuss the groundbreaking NLRB decision that Northwestern University’s football players are employees and thus eligible to form a union. Plus: a growing campaign to opt out of standardized testing, the difference between unemployment and retirement, the struggle against Amazon in Europe, and more.
That publishers routinely fill their mastheads and bylines with a disproportionate number of white men should hardly come as a surprise when even getting a foot in the door of the industry requires a significant amount of capital, both economic and social.
“Over half of big manufacturers say they’re thinking of insourcing jobs from abroad,” crowed President Barack Obama in this year’s State of the Union address. Riding the wave of populist anti-offshoring sentiment that served him so well in the 2012 …
This week on Belabored, we speak to activists with the Retail Action Project and Women Employed about the impact of unfair scheduling on the lives of retail workers. We also discuss the Supreme Court drama over employer-sponsored health insurance and reproductive rights, “the end of jobs,” labor protections for unpaid interns, Wall Street’s attack on Los Angeles, TaskRabbit, and more.
Libertarianism is suddenly in fashion. Denouncing the NSA, Rand Paul draws cheers both from young leftists in Berkeley and young conservatives in D.C.—and narrowly leads in early polls for the 2016 presidential nomination. The Koch brothers—who once bankrolled the Libertarian Party—plan to spend …
