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 …
“Check your Rolex. It’s time for a rebellion.” In the fall of 2010, protesters against the reform of the French pension system lacked neither catchy slogans nor energy. For more than a month, unionists and a variety of left activists …
What do the depressing, if predictable, results of the 2010 midterm election mean for the potential for progressive change in our country? In the storm of post-debacle opinions, two kinds of arguments have held sway—one quite dark, the other glinting …
Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974–1980 by Laura Kalman W.W. Norton, 2010, 473 pp. Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies by Judith Stein Yale University Press, 2010, 384 pp. Stayin’ Alive: The …
I joined the Carpenters Union in Portland, Oregon, in the spring of 1975. At the time, I was one of twenty-two million union members, representing nearly 29 percent of the nation’s work force. Today, despite substantial growth in the size …
In recent months, a number of official announcements from inside Cuba have led to speculation that meaningful political change could be underway. From a declaration that it will release a number of political prisoners to an apology for past repression …
This spring, graduate students at New York University made history when they won recognition for the first graduate student union at a private university. To accomplish this feat, students had to overcome the political and legal opposition of virtually every …
The New Men of Power is a study of trade unions and their leaders, the American political scene, and the prospects for a radicalized democracy in the years just after the Second World War. When C. Wright Mills published the …
