Departments

;

labor

  • SOURCE: Peste
    2/21/2023

    Can a "Return to Normal" Happen Without Repairing Sociability?

    by Nate Holdren

    The push to return to many pre-pandemic modes of working and living is taking place without sufficient provision for mitigating risk, and with seriously damaged bonds of trust and mutual support; people are again in proximity to each other, but far from being together. 

  • SOURCE: Yes!
    1/26/2023

    Why We Need Pirates

    by Paul Buhle, Marcus Rediker and David Lester

    Though vilified in popular culture, the history of piracy shows that many crews were egalitarian bands of maritime workers escaping their exploitation at the hands of merchant companies and navies. A new graphic adaptation of a recent history of piracy tells the story. 

  • 1/15/2023

    Revisiting Kropotkin 180 Years After His Birth

    by Sam Ben-Meir

    The rise of automation and the concurrent squeeze of workers in the name of profit offer an opportunity to revisit the ideas of Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin as a forward-looking critique of power. 

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    12/8/2022

    The University of California is Also a Landlord

    The system, which approximates a real estate investment firm that also confers degrees, is squeezing its graduate students both as their wage-payer and as a large-scale landlord that contributes to a housing market that is unaffordable to graduate assistants and postdoctoral researchers. 

  • SOURCE: Yale Daily News
    11/27/2022

    Grad Workers: Choose Solidarity with New Haven

    by Adom Getachew and Sarah Haley

    Two former Yale PhD students argue that the university's graduate student union offers not just benefits and protection to graduate student workers, but the chance for them to work in solidarity with other university and New Haven workers across the vast racial and socioeconomic divides separating city and campus. 

  • SOURCE: TIME
    11/28/2022

    Can the UC Strike Remake Higher Education?

    The strike is driven by the crises in both academic labor and housing costs, which make poverty wages for graduate student workers far less tolerable than they used to be. Historian James Vernon is one faculty member cancelling his classes in solidarity. 

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    11/29/2022

    What's at Stake in the UC Grad Strike

    by Jay Caspian Kang

    While public support for unions has grown in recent years, it's not clear if the public understands that the working class is now likely to be involved in knowledge work. The strike by University of California graduate workers hopes to change that. 

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    11/29/2022

    The Cultural Workers Go On Strike

    A "black turtleneck uprising" of museum workers and adjunct professors tells us that brain work has become gig work, challenging cherished myths about education, opportunity and meritocracy. 

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    10/12/2022

    The Selective Politics of the "Learning Loss" Debate

    by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

    Discussions of the disruption to learning caused by COVID-related school closures often ignore the endemic inequalities in American education and exposure to harm from COVID, and sideline the voices of teachers who have been sounding the alarm about the dangerous state of their facilities for years. 

  • SOURCE: Jacobin
    6/27/2022

    The Labor Upsurge Calls Us to Rethink Organizing Rules

    by Chris Brooks

    Do the successes of organizers at Amazon and Starbucks mean the age of slow, methodical and gradual organizing is over? Can workers use a union vote itself as an organizing tool to move quickly and defeat union-busting?