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.
Following last week’s Supreme Court decision that UPS had unfairly denied a pregnant worker reasonable accommodations on the job, Belabored talked with Melissa Josephs, from Women Employed, an Illinois-based organization that successfully campaigned for a new state law to protect pregnant worker’s rights, and Latavia Johnson, a Walmart worker in Illinois.
As “eds and meds” reshape working-class New Haven, labor and community groups are joining forces to transform the service economy and build a more democratic city.
What is the Trans-Pacific Partnership? It’s hard to know since the deal is being negotiated almost entirely in secret. Belabored talks with Celeste Drake, Trade & Globalization Policy Specialist at the AFL-CIO, about the ramifications of the trade deal for workers around the globe.
Lawmakers across the country are racing to pass so-called “right-to-work” legislation, the euphemistically named union-busting policy that restricts the collection of fees from all workers covered by a union contract. Belabored spoke with historian Elizabeth Shermer about the politics and history of right-to-work policies, and what labor can do to fight back.
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.
Since the 1990s, immigrant and labor activists in Los Angeles have worked together to build a powerful progressive movement.
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 popular 2014 film Pride neatly dramatizes how queer–labor solidarity during the miners’ strike pushed back against Margaret Thatcher’s combination of social conservatism and market nihilism.
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.
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.
To dwell solely on the grim events in Washington is to neglect the more complicated and, potentially, more hopeful reality taking shape in American cities today.
Introducing our Winter issue.
Lane Kenworthy delivers a crisp manifesto for an “American” version of social democracy. But can his vision transcend Republican extremism, union decline, and our country’s racial heterogeneity?
Pro-democracy activism in China takes many forms. For longtime labor activist Han Dongfang, it starts on the shop floor. In this Belabored bonus edition, the veteran of the Tiananmen Square uprising and director of China Labour Bulletin discusses his vision for social change in China, and the promise and the peril of labor organizing in the engine of global capitalism.
