The Mexican government’s decision to expropriate the country’s oil in 1938 was sparked by uprisings tied to the labor and environmental abuses of foreign companies. If the state-run energy company is privatized, reform will have to include stepped-up environmental monitoring and control.
I used to describe my busy schedule at the “best writing job in America.” But in the hectic pace of my life in those days, I now see myself avoiding my growing sense of dread and desperation. It wasn’t until years later that the scales began to fall from my eyes, allowing me to appraise my work life with honesty and to see myself for what I was: just another working person whose dreams of a decent future had slowly faded before the harsh realities of below-inflation raises and relentlessly rising health care costs.
It was an ad on a subway train that first gave me the idea to become a teacher. In March of 2003, my senior year of college, I was riding along listening to my MP3 player when I looked up and saw an advertisement for New York City Teaching Fellows—a black background with stark white lettering: “How many lives did your last spreadsheet change?” The job seemed like a challenge, and that was what I was looking for.
Few political mobilizations inspired Dissent editors and writers as much as the 1963 March on Washington. On the March’s fiftieth anniversary, check out archival gems by Tom Kahn, Bayard Rustin, Irving Howe, A. Philip Randolph, and others.
To be stripped of one’s citizenship rights is to be consigned to a ghetto of one. But it’s not just fascists and dictators who engage in such practices. As historian Patrick Weil notes, the United States has frequently revoked the citizenship of Americans, too.
This week, Sarah and Josh discuss recent labor developments, including a big raise for Walmart warehouse workers, and a judge’s reversal in the fight over New York hospital closures. Then they’re joined by City Paper reporter Daniel Denvir, who breaks down the latest in the under-covered crisis in Philadelphia’s public schools.
Sergio De La Pava’s A Naked Singularity is a vindication of the novel as a medium that allows time and space to serious considerations about how we organize our society and how we organize our lives. In the past thirty years our art has grown less serious and our politics more cruel. It has taken a novel of the artistic ambition and moral seriousness of A Naked Singularity to show us why this is no coincidence at all.
The violence following the removal of Mohamed Morsi continues to spiral out of control, and is in many respects too senseless to be analyzed. Difficult as it is to understand current Egyptian politics and predict where the country might go next, the following observations are intended to shed some light on that very complex and confused landscape.
How do sex, race, and class shape what counts as “work” and as “life”? Why do these conversations neglect a life for women outside productive or reproductive labor? Is it time for labor to demand the right to free time? The nineteenth episode of Belabored takes on these questions plus the latest developments in labor news.
Fifty years after the March on Washington, we confront a system that idealizes diversity even as it continues to produce injustice in the aggregate. To rescue the dream, we need a politics that combines race and class, just as reality does.
Contingent faculty constitute an academic proletariat, where a lack of workplace control, negligible job security, and prevailing low wages define the conditions of employment. In response to these conditions, previously solitary academic laborers are joining together in an attempt to speak with a collective voice.
Work, and in particular white, professional woman’s work, is at the center of contemporary feminist discourse. Nancy Fraser’s new book points in a different direction, calling for the re-incorporation of political economy into feminist discourse and for policy changes that would give women more control of their time
This week on Belabored, an interview with historian William Jones about the forgotten history of civil rights and the relation between racial and economic justice. Plus the latest on prevailing wage law in New York, living wage law in DC, domestic workers’ rights, and labor issues at the ACLU.
The initial promise was that Massively Open Online Courses would function as a free educational commons, along the lines of other free internet resources. The new MOOC strategy, however, involves rich universities being paid by poor ones.
This week on Belabored: a closer look at the historic fast food strikes in seven cities and an exploration of the relationship between funding sources and internal democracy in alt-labor. Plus college athletes, graduate student employees, and sobering survey data.
