The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination Nelson Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, eds. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012, 432 pp. As the overall unionization rate in the United States dips ever closer to single digits, the …
In her time at Facebook, Losse saw the ideas behind Lean In take root. The book’s goals become legible when understood to be as informed by Silicon Valley business tactics as by feminism. What exactly are we leaning into?
Almost four years into the “recovery,” the employment picture is still grim. It’s not just the unemployment rate’s agonizingly slow descent. We still face persistently high rates of underemployment (including those who would like to work but have given up …
Organized fast-food workers recently celebrated a tentative victory in New York. Deliverymen at four Manhattan Domino’s locations were granted leave to amend a complaint in an ongoing class-action lawsuit—a mundane but necessary step in what labor organizing has become in …
We are pleased to announce that in just a few weeks, Dissent will launch our first podcast, Belabored, with hosts Josh Eidelson and Sarah Jaffe. Josh and Sarah are among the finest labor journalists working today. And we hear they …
However bold the president’s pitch seems in the current political climate, a minimum wage of $9.00/hour is still a modest threshold by any sensible measure.
Southern conservatives—including “right to work” progenitor and avowed white supremacist Vance Muse—feared that if unions united working-class whites and blacks, they could upend the Jim Crow order.
If graduate students like myself do not want to come into work one day to find ourselves replaced by video lectures delivered by “information curators,” we will have to learn to take collective action.
There is no such thing as a spontaneous strike, protest, or any other kind of social irruption. Spontaneity is just another word for ignorance on the part of those in power who are the object of subaltern scorn and protest.
The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Timothy Noah Bloomsbury Press, 2012, 272 pp. In September 2010, a full year before protesters occupied Zuccotti Park in New York City, Timothy Noah wrote …
The following is an exchange between Tim Barker, assistant editor at Dissent, and James Livingston, professor of history at Rutgers University and author, most recently, of Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your …
Courtney Johnson, who has taught English in Ohio high schools for a decade, never expected to make news. In her classes, she routinely stressed the importance of civic participation and political awareness. As adviser to the school newspaper, she emphasized …
Heist: Who Stole the America Dream? a documentary by Frances Causey and Donald Goldmacher, 2012 The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, 2010 By now, most leftists and much of mainstream America are …
Mention the Democrats in Congress, and the emotional response of most left-leaning Americans will veer from moderate disappointment to frothing cynicism. Some pols fail to live up to their own hype as zealous reformers, while others seem mainly concerned with …
It now seems like ancient history: the few weeks between Barack Obama’s election in November 2008 and the onset, after the inauguration, of intransigent, increasingly successful Republican opposition to his entire program. That was a moment in which hostility to …
