Josh and Sarah interview Gabriel Thompson, biographer of Fred Ross, the little-known organizer who trained Cesar Chavez. They also discuss the latest strikes by low-wage workers, a strike in Dubai of immigrant workers, & more.
Obama’s appointments to the National Labor Relations Board rejected, new strike authorizations, and Sarah and Josh discuss the state of fast food workers’ organizing efforts. They interview journalist Jake Blumgart about recent developments around anti-sweatshop activism, at-will employment, the future of Atlantic City, and high-stakes testing at a sushi restaurant.
Sarah and Josh discuss port trucker organizing in Savannah, fast food strikes in St. Louis, and one union’s experiment with using collective bargaining as a weapon against big banks. Then they consider the anti-union record of Obama’s new nominee for the Commerce Department, and the Democratic Party’s future with organized labor.
Sarah and Josh interview Hyatt hotel housekeeper Cathy Youngblood, a leader in UNITE HERE battling with the hotel giant, on Obama’s choice of a Hyatt heir to run the Commerce Department, and her “Someone Like Me” campaign calling for a worker to be added to Hyatt’s board. Plus labor news and “I wish I’d written that!”
Today marks the rallying of the international labor movement. We asked our favorite labor journalists and scholars to pick highlights from the last year of general strikes, minority strikes, walkouts, and international solidarity. Here’s what they chose.
For low-wage workers, it’s almost insanely risky to strike. This Wednesday, they went on strike in Chicago. Why? YOLO.
Sarah and Josh talk strikes: the latest wave of one-day, low-wage, non-union work stoppages and, hypothetically, what might happen if everyone doing care work in America…stopped.
Last week’s tragedies at the Boston Marathon and in tiny West, Texas, made one thing clear: terrorist violence fascinates early twenty-first-century Americans far more than industrial disaster, even when latter brings far more devastation. We still await word on just …
Patricia thought she had crossed the border to a land where she could finally earn a good living. She ended up in one of the worst places to be a woman. As a migrant farmworker, she was brutalized and raped …
NBC Chicago is reporting that “hundreds of fast-food and retail workers walked off their jobs Wednesday morning to…call for higher wages” and the ability to unionize without intimidation. For many workers, like Esly Hernandez (interviewed by Ned Resnikoff at MSNBC), …
It’s been a grim week. Whether it was the bombing at the Boston marathon or the explosion of a fertilizer plant in small-town Texas, the week’s events have instilled, for many in the U.S., a renewed sense of vulnerability to …
Belabored interviews the BBC’s Paul Mason and talks minimum wage, maximum subsidies, the expansion of Working America, the end of the American Crystal Sugar lockout, the beginning of a strike at “Fashion Police,” and the role of guestworkers in the immigration debate.
Organized labor in the United States has always been an urban institution. But new estimates of union density in American metropolitan settings show that relationship unraveling.
Delivering flexibility and scale at rock-bottom prices, Foxconn keeps pounding out the very real underpinnings of the New Economy, remaking global manufacturing in its own image. Foxconn stands as the archetypal industrial firm for today’s planet of slums.
Please join us for a conversation and party to launch Belabored, Dissent’s new labor podcast hosted by Josh Eidelson and Sarah Jaffe. Thursday, April 18, 7:00 p.m. Smart Clothes Gallery 154 Stanton Street New York, NY 10002 Our conversation will …
