According to Fortune magazine, Starbucks will “encourage baristas to discuss race relations with customers”. Starbucks’ media page says that a series of “racially charged tragedies” sparked the initiative “Race Together”. The initiative comes with stickers: [Race Together] may also engage customers in conversation …
Establishment economists insist that they don’t second-guess consumer preferences. You are, they say, your own best judge of what’s good for you. But not if you like to travel by train.
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.
The Justice Department report offers a glimpse of the systematically oppressive and petty policing in Ferguson. But in order to fully understand how racism became policy in the St. Louis suburbs, we need to look at the history of suburban development itself.
Colleagues, critics, and obituary writers have described Philip Levine as “poet of the American working class,” “a large, ironic Whitman of the industrial heartland,” the poet who explored “his gritty Detroit childhood; the soul-numbing factory jobs he held as a …
Tim Shenk talks with historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore about Wonder Woman and the lost history of feminism.
Please join us this Thursday in NYC for a roundtable discussion with experts on China, India, Japan, and Russia, hosted by the India-China Institute at the New School. Moderator: Jeff Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s professor of History, University of California at Irvine; …
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.
On Thursday, February 12, I walked into Massachusetts Hall with thirty-three other Divest Harvard members and began a twenty-four-hour sit-in outside Harvard President Drew Faust’s office. Amidst the intensity, chaos, stress, and excitement of those hours, I learned an enduring …
The success of Ava DuVernay’s Oscar-nominated film Selma has created the impression that the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march was the defining civil rights story of 1965. As a result, we haven’t paid the attention we should to the event with which Selma …
On January 7, the literary event everyone was expecting did not occur. Indeed, the long-awaited publication of Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, Soumission—which envisions, in 2022, the second round of a French presidential election opposing Marine Le Pen, leader of the …
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 hopes and fears of leftists around the world following Syriza’s dizzying victory last week can best be summed up by a famous scene on the TV show Saved by the Bell where the episode’s heroine, Jesse Spano, takes too many caffeine …
To kick off our new Q&A series, Booked, Tim Shenk talks to historian Daniel Immerwahr about “a left that can operate on all scales.”
