labor history 
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SOURCE: The Nation
Debate: Should Workers Organize Workplaces or Industries?
The history of broad organizing in whole industries like automobiles offers both inspiration and caution to workers who see organizing in the service industry as the key to a fairer economy. Two labor experts discuss.
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SOURCE: Jewish Currents
3/14/2023
The History and Politics of the Right to Grieve
by Erik Baker
Grief isn't a personal psychological and emotional process; we experience it through the demands a capitalist economy makes on our time, energy and attention. It's time to make bereavement a matter of right, instead of a favor doled out at the whim of your boss.
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SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
3/1/2023
Academic Workers Looking to History for Organizing Strategies in Antiunion States
The United Public Workers of America were pioneers in organizing academic workers across professional and occupational lines, until being red-baited.
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SOURCE: Jewish Currents
2/24/2023
Little Bargains for Big Issues
by Michael Paul Berlin
Bargaining teams representing University of California graduate workers focused narrowly on economic issues, and not on building unity of workers and the communities around universities. This is a historical pattern of a "business unionism" model eclipsing a view of unions as social movements. Workers need to change this.
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SOURCE: In These Times
2/24/2023
It's Time for Labor Spring
by Cindy Hahamovich, William P. Jones and Joseph A. McCartin
In 1996, labor unions connected with campus activists to support anti-sweatshop movements, living wage campaigns for campus workers, and graduate student union organization. Now, labor must expand that effort for "wall-to-wall" organizing to make campuses better and more democratic workplaces.
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2/26/2023
What Airports Can Tell Us About Histories of Regional Development
by Eric Porter
From the perspective of travelers, airports appear as generic "non-places." But for people who aren't just passing through—entrepreneurs, activists, and especially workers—their particularity makes them sites of struggle that shape the life of a region. Historians have much to learn from them, too.
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2/26/2023
Christopher Gorham Gives the Remarkable Anna Marie Rosenberg the Bio She Deserves
by Kathryn Smith
From the New Deal's NRA to the Manhattan Project's labor needs, and from the launch of Social Security to JFK's famous birthday party featuring Marilyn Monroe, Rosenberg was a master facilitator who had a hand in many of the policies that shaped modern America, as a compelling new biography explains.
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SOURCE: CNN
2/16/2023
Temple Revives Old-Time Union Busting against Grad Students
by Heather Ann Thompson
Temple's decision to revoke the tuition remission of striking grad students (and threaten their ability to complete degrees) is the kind of hardball tactic that bodes ill for workers in every workplace in America, and a reminder of the need to understand the country's labor history.
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2/6/2023
How We Brought the Radical History of Pirates to Life
by David Lester
Visual artist David Lester discusses the creative process of developing a graphic version of the radical history of piracy, a collaboration with historians Marcus Rediker and Paul Buhle.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
1/27/2023
Review: New Book Worships the False Idol of the Responsible Corporation
The idea of corporate social responsibility is an artifact of the domination of society by big business, a domination so powerful as to make alternatives exceedingly difficult to imagine. A new book internalizes that difficulty.
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SOURCE: The Nation
1/10/2023
Want to Reverse Polarization and Democratic Decline? Support Unionization
by Jacob M. Grumbach
The need for a renewed labor movement is a key component of democratic renewal that is too often ignored by Democratic strategists, says a political scientist who studies antidemocratic politics.
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SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
1/3/2023
Assessing the UC Grad Strike
by Laura J. Mitchell
Despite winning increases in wages and benefits, University of California graduate student workers still face the problem of working amid the rubble of a social contract uniting universities, students, and the public around the idea of the university as a public good.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
12/28/2022
The Think Tank Trying to Defund Public Sector Unions
Labor historian Lane Windham describes a well-funded effort to encourage union members to opt out of paying dues, a strategy designed to force their unions to do more with less. Organizing to recruit new members and energize existing ones is the way to fight back.
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SOURCE: KCRW
12/13/2022
What's Pushing White-Collar Workers Toward Unions?
Labor historian Lane Windham discusses the surge in pro-union activism among academics, journalists and other knowledge workers.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
12/14/2022
The Farm Workforce Modernization Act Raises Troubling Echoes
by Matt Garcia
The support of the United Farm Workers for the bill cuts against the organization's origins in opposition to the Bracero guestworker program, and signals its shift toward advocacy of global responsibility initiatives in the food supply chain. Other labor organizations believe the bill would reestablish indentured servitude in farm work.
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SOURCE: Yahoo
12/10/2022
Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández Teams Up with New LA City Councilors to Review City's History
A historian and two recently-elected progressive city council members teamed up to tour the sites of the city's community of Mexican revolutionaries in exile, asking how the past can inform social movements today.
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SOURCE: The Baffler
12/8/2022
"Amtrak Joe" Leaves Rail Workers in the Dust
by Kim Kelly
Why did the "most pro-union president" in modern times push through a negotiated settlement rejected by the majority of railroad union members, and what would Eugene Debs think?
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SOURCE: History Club (Substack)
12/4/2022
Qatar's World Cup Echoes Brutal American Labor History
by Jason Steinhauer
Exposés of the brutal conditions faced by migrant laborers who built Qatar's World Cup facilities echoes the history of American public works, where workers' bodies and lives were subordinated to budgets and timetables.
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SOURCE: World Socialist Website
12/5/2022
No Surprise, Historians' Open Letter on Railroad Labor Dispute Met Deaf Ears at White House
by Tom Mackaman
One labor historian finds his colleague's offer of advice to the Biden administration naive in light of the Democratic Party's (and the American state's) support for capital over labor.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
12/2/2022
The Biggest Threat to America's Stability is the Class Divide
by Kim Phillips-Fein
We mistakenly bemoan "polarization" instead of reckoning with the economic power of radical right-wing elites, who have the resources to fund growing organizations, and the growing number of people disaffected from the social order who are susceptible to their messages.
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