Why Labor Moved Left
After decades of defeat, organized labor has become the domain of reluctant radicals.
Winter 2025
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Belabored Podcast #81: Live, with Who Makes Cents?
Audio from our live discussion on labor and the history of capitalism, with Betsy Beasley and David Stein.
Where’s the Outrage?
As historian Steve Fraser sees it, we should look toward the “long nineteenth century” for inspiration in constructing a new, lasting American resistance to capitalism.
Introducing Our Summer Issue: American Movements
What are the visions and complaints, accomplishments and limits of the largest and most important movements on the left today?
Belabored Podcast #80: Class Struggle? There’s An App for That
What if you could run a workplace organizing campaign through your smartphone? We speak with Mark Zuckerman, president of The Century Foundation, about how unions can use digital platforms to empower workers. Plus: the latest on Uber, Verizon, the TPP, and an ice-cream labor revolt.
Belabored Podcast #79: On Board for $15
Irene Tung of the National Employment Law Project explains Andrew Cuomo’s new wage board, an unconventional way that New York fast food workers might see a raise. Plus, audio from the Walmart shareholders meeting.
Chinese Labor Divided
China’s recent uptick in labor unrest has given leftists hope that the world’s largest working class is building a labor movement to match its scale. But Chinese workers are still far from having a national voice.
Belabored Podcast #78: The Union and the University
Organizers from five private universities discuss what’s next for grad student unionism.
Belabored Podcast #77: Should the Labor Movement Support Basic Income?
This week, Sarah and Michelle invited Hack the Union editor Kati Sipp to explain universal basic income, and why it’s an important idea for workers. They discuss automation, which parts of the social safety net UBI would replace, and what it has to do with the unwaged work that women do in the home.
Classroom Saints and Fiends
Dana Goldstein’s The Teacher Wars shows that the failed ideas underlying today’s ed-reform crusade are as old as public education itself.
Organizing the Unorganizable
Worker centers have empowered nurses, nannies, busboys, taxi drivers, and many other low-wage immigrants long thought to be “unorganizable.” They provide clues to the future of organized labor—but can their victories scale up?
Belabored Podcast #76: May Day Special! Labor Shuts It Down From Baltimore to Long Beach
This May Day, we bring you voices from the streets of Baltimore and Long Beach—where unions are helping mobilize their communities against police terror and for economic justice—and from a West Coast Walmart, where activist Venanzi Luna has been leading the fight against union-busting. Plus: Whatever happened to the eight-hour day?
Belabored Podcast #75: What’s Next in the Fight for $15?
Following Wednesday’s nationwide protests for a living wage, Sarah and Michelle spoke with workers in New York and Atlanta about why they joined the Fight for $15 movement and what they hope it will achieve.
The Men in the Middle
If there’s an engine that continues to draw millions of workers into the Persian Gulf’s draconian labor regime, it is the middlemen—the underground network of recruitment agents that reaches into every corner of rural South Asia, dangling the possibility of a better life before communities ravaged by neoliberalism.
The Assistant Economy
Welcome to the main artery into creative or elite work—highly pressurized, poorly recompensed, sometimes exhilarating, more often menial. From the confluence of two grand movements in American history—the continued flight of women out of the home and into the workplace, and the rise of the “creative class”—the personal assistant is born.
