Increasingly complicit politicians, businessmen, and professionals have allowed mafia groups to conquer significant sections of the market economy in Milan—far afield from their traditional base in southern Italy. But a growing anti-mafia movement, led by young people and championed by municipal politicians, is pushing back.
In 2005, the Navajo Nation passed its own version of the Defense of Marriage Act called the Diné Marriage Act. Navajo LGBT activists have recently reignited their struggle to overturn the law, hoping to capitalize on decisions legalizing gay marriage in Utah and New Mexico late last year. In the process, they have raised long-standing questions about the reach of the U.S. legal system onto Native lands.
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.
American inequality is driven not just by the uneven distribution of wages, but also by the uneven distribution of job-based benefits. More than any other country, the United States relies on private employment and private bargaining to deliver basic social benefits—including health coverage, retirement security, and paid leave. The results—on any basic measure of economic security—have been dismal.
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a weighty book, replete with good information on the flows of income, transfers of wealth, and the distribution of financial resources in some of the world’s wealthiest countries. But it is not a very sound guide to policy. And despite its great ambitions, his book is not the accomplished work of high theory that its title, length, and reception (so far) suggest.
Octavio Paz spoke out against American imperialism in Latin America throughout his career, but his outspoken opposition to Stalinism and revolutionary violence got him smeared as a Reaganite. On the poet’s centenary, a look at his politics and his most comprehensive collection in English.
Fewer than 4,000 men and women have been formally designated as trafficked to the United States. This number obscures not only the tens of thousands of forced labor victims whose cases go unreported, but the millions of migrants who face comparable abuse—just not enough to fit the legal definition of trafficking. It’s impossible to tell the story of trafficking without telling their story, too.
This week, Belabored talks to political scientist Adolph Reed about his recent article in Harper’s magazine, examining the broad prospects for today’s left, the need to focus on inequality, why the labor movement matters, and why Democrats relying on big money donors is like keeping a Komodo dragon in your bedroom. Plus: a strike in Vermont, a lawsuit at McDonald’s, a modest proposal for executive salaries, and more.
Labor standards are a key buffer against inequality, setting both an economic and ethical floor. But, on both scores, the current minimum wage offers a pretty shaky floor. Its value—in historical and international terms—is meager; its coverage is uneven; and it is poorly enforced. How did we get here?
By now much of the world has heard of Toronto’s mayor Rob Ford. But the real story in Toronto is not Rob Ford. How did one of North America’s most diverse cities in one of the west’s most robust democracies come to elect a right-wing populist?
In January, the well-known pickup artist Roosh V created a sub-forum on his website to discuss the Ukraine conflict, thanks to “heavy interest” in the topic among his fans. What will happen if the “pussy paradise” joins the European Union?
This week, Belabored examines the history and ongoing impact of the 2012 Chicago teachers’ strike with Micah Uetricht, author of Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity. Plus: uprisings by UPS workers in New York and IBM workers in China; labor abuses by the Pentagon overseas; the White House’s plans to expand overtime pay; and more.
Under the New Deal order, unions not only sustained prosperity but ensured that it was shared. Since the 1970s, however, the attack on unions has reversed these gains. Today, both union membership and inequality stand roughly at 1920s levels.
Last week, the College Board announced changes to the Scholastic Aptitude Test because it had “become disconnected from the work of our high schools.” But can test reforms change the class and racial biases of U.S. college admissions?
This week, Belabored talks to Melissa Gira Grant, whose new book Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work dismantles the myths surrounding sex work and challenges us to think about sex work in the same framework in which we put other kinds of labor. At the heart is the question: should workers have to love their work in order to be able to demand rights and protections on the job?
