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 …
Some people work in restaurants as a lifestyle choice: they love the fast pace, the quick jokes, the often easy-flowing booze. At the height of a busy shift, if everything’s going right, a team of skilled cooks and waiters can …
Progressives have forgotten how to think about the constitutional dimensions of economic life. Work, livelihood, and opportunity; material security and insecurity; poverty and dependency; union organizing, collective bargaining, and workplace democracy: for generations of American reformers, the constitutional importance of …
A decade before Abram Hewitt defeated Henry George’s bid for mayor of New York in 1886, he delivered a more lasting blow to the American Left. A prominent northern congressman and chair of the Democratic National Committee, Hewitt played a …
Until the emergence of Occupy Wall Street, a disturbing absence marked American political life. The nation’s economic miseries continued, with unemployment high and home sales stagnant or dropping. The gap between the wealthiest Americans and their fellow citizens yawned wider …
Most people think that farm work in the vineyards and fields of California is unskilled labor, largely undifferentiated work in which an army of Mexican-born migrants follow the harvest northward from the border as the fruits and vegetables ripen with …
Flora Johnson takes care of her adult son Kenneth, who suffers from cerebral palsy. She used to work as a cashier at a unionized grocery store and made enough to buy a home in the Washington Square neighborhood on the …
At a time when unions are floundering and popular sentiment toward organized labor is at an all-time low of 45 percent, one workers’ organization is thriving. The Freelancers’ Union, a nonprofit organization based in a trendy Brooklyn neighborhood, has more …
I don’t think my political analysis can be understood apart from my class experiences. And those experiences probably explain a lot about why I’m writing this essay on how workers have been betrayed, devalued, stigmatized, and misunderstood. I’m the kid …
Alan Greenspan described the 1981 destruction of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization as “perhaps most important” of all of Reagan’s domestic undertakings. The defeat of PATCO during the first summer of the Reagan administration “gave weight to the legal …
This past spring, Western and Egyptian media alike attributed the explosive Tahrir Square protests to organizing by middle-class movements of students and intellectuals, battling for political freedom and armed with social media. This popular narrative holds that it was only …
In his oft-quoted Fifth Report to the Massachusetts Board of Education (1841), Horace Mann sought to popularize the idea that education had individual as well as collective economic benefits. This report became one of the most well-known of Mann’s twelve …
“Democracy is nothing if it is not dangerous,” declared Carl Oglesby in 1965. As president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the largest group on the white New Left, he was rebutting liberals who were displeased that communists could …
The Left has been a complete, if noble, failure: it’s one of the oldest clichés of American history. “Radicalism in the United States has no great triumphs to record,” asserted Christopher Lasch, and “…the sooner we begin to understand why …
“WE may, at long last, have a way to liberate our nation from the domination of those who should be our public servants but instead are frequently our union masters.” Conservative commentator and pollster Dick Morris wrote those words after …
