Labor Needs New Ideas
Labor needs to argue more. Unions always need solidarity, but it should not be the solidarity of the stolid and defeated.
Winter 2024
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How a Group of Migrants Fought for $15 and Worker Power—And Won
“You feel free—you feel this is your business,” says trafficking survivor Judith Daluz of the cleaning cooperative where she is now a worker-owner.
Beyond the Polluters
Bernie Sanders’s climate plan offers a welcome alternative to the vagueness of the Paris Agreement. But to win over a broader public, a leftist climate agenda will require a vision of a “just transition” that goes beyond our energy system.
Belabored Podcast #92: Don’t Mourn, Organize!
A celebration of pioneering union activist and radical troubadour Joe Hill.
The High Toll of Fast Fashion
The True Cost vividly documents the labor and environmental cost of our cheap clothes. The challenge it poses is direct: how can we stop this? But a deeper question remains: which “we”?
Belabored Podcast #91: Fasting for $15 and Full-Time
This Black Friday, Walmart workers and their allies have undertaken a “Fast for $15.” Belabored spoke with Dan Schlademan, co-director of OUR Walmart, and Tyfani Faulkner, who was in the middle of her fifteen days without food.
Belabored Podcast #90: Offshoring Dirty Jobs, with Erik Loomis
An interview with historian Erik Loomis about his new book, Out of Sight, on the labor and environmental catastrophes caused by our outsourcing of dirty jobs. Plus: the Mizzou football players, updates in the Fight for $15, and FedEx workers on strike.
Belabored Podcast #89: Banking on Change, with Khalid Taha
Bank worker Khalid Taha tells us why he’s standing up for better banks and better wages. Plus: Bernie Sanders on a picket line, sexual harassment at T-Mobile, and a win in the fight against on-call scheduling.
Republic of Labor
At its most radical, labor republicanism envisioned not only freedom from wage slavery but cooperative self-organization. It also challenged women’s domination in the home—something Alex Gourevitch’s new history misses.
Belabored Podcast #88: Dismantling Two-Tier
Recent contract negotiations at Fiat Chrysler are signaling an end to the infamous two-tier wage system. We speak with Chrysler worker Alex Wassell and Professor of Industrial Relations at Clark University Gary Chaison about the new deal.
In Praise of Amateur Politics
Leftists will never entirely be released from the obligation to engage with the Democratic Party, but the left’s strength, and its power, will always lie outside formal politics.
With a counter-argument from Michael Kazin.
Back to Class
It is time to think about class. The insurgencies we most need today are the insurgencies of large numbers.
Belabored Podcast #87: Class War in the Classroom
Megan Erickson joins us to discuss her new book, Class War: The Privatization of Childhood, and how education can’t solve inequality, but can become less unequal.
Reorganizing Labor
Only a mass movement by union members and sympathetic workers will transform organized labor into the bold agent of change it once was.
Less Work, More Time
Feminists shouldn’t just call for a better balance between waged work and housework—between work and work. We should do the unimaginable: ask for more time.
