Spring 2025

There is a certain time perspective that goes with editing and writing for a quarterly. I am able to think very slowly, which is a way of thinking that comes naturally to me. How anyone writes regularly for the daily …

As Joseph McCartin correctly notes, the year 2003 marked the launch of the most significant legislative campaign in a quarter century to protect the fundamental human right of America’s workers to form unions and bargain collectively, without employer interference. The …

Joseph A. McCartin’s essay makes a valuable contribution to debates on labor movement revival. He sees danger in labor advocates’ new focus on human rights, and calls instead for making a renewed (and perhaps re-phrased) notion of “industrial democracy” labor’s …

My article in the Summer 2004 Dissent was called “Israel: No Souvenirs.” But I was wrong: early one Saturday morning, early in the fall, I got a phone call from the great Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua, who wanted to let …

Toward a Re-framing of Labor’s Argument

Diamond: A Struggle For Envioronmental Justice in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor by Steve Lerner

Americans have not been constitutionally prone to pessimism. We’re supposed to be pragmatic, ingenious, and inclined to think that hard work and a little luck will fix just about anything. And yet, we are told in myriad ways that we …

Rick Fantasia and Kim Voss’s Hard Work, Dan Clawson’s The Next Upsurge, Steven Henry Lopez’s Reorganizing the Rust Belt, and Rebuilding Labor, edited by Ruth Milkman and Kim Voss

The attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, lit up the global landscape. Not only in these two cities, but wherever the news and the pictures reached during the first hours after the planes struck-all over the …

The West, the East, and Abu Ghraib

Speaking to the Working Class

Republican Strategy to Elect Jeb Bush

I begin with a passage from a 1954 essay of Irving Howe’s, reprinted in the recent Fifty Years of Dissent volume, called, premonitorily enough, “The Problem of U.S. Power”: The central fact [he writes] is that we continue to live …