strikes

Will Solidarity Among Hollywood's Unions Make this Strike Different?

by Miranda Banks and Kate Fortmueller

A historic pattern of rivalry among Hollywood's big unions representing writers, actors and set workers has limited their ability to win against the industry. Support for striking writers suggests the big unions are getting on the same page. 

Kagan, Sotomayor Join SCOTUS Cons in Sticking it to Unions

By an 8-1 vote, with only Ketanji Brown Jackson in dissent, the Court allowed employers to bypass the National Labor Relations Board to seek potentially crippling tort judgments against unions for business losses related to strikes, removing a major incentive for good-faith negotiation by employers. 

Buried Footage Helped Chicago Police Get Away with Killing 10 Labor Activists in 1937

by Greg Mitchell

Paramount's newsreel division shot footage of the murderous attack on a steelworkers' march in 1937. They sided with the bosses by burying the footage. Even after Senator Robert LaFollette pushed for the film's release, cities banned it from the screen as Chicago prosecutors ruled the killings justifiable. A new documentary tells the story of the film. 

Rutgers Strikers Ran the Table; Is This the Way out of Higher Ed's Crisis?

by Jonathan David

Three Rutgers unions, representing instructors in different professional positions, won by modeling the kind of solidarity that university workers need to fight back against the privatization and corporatization of public higher education. 

Rutgers Unions Suspend Strike after Big Gains

Although unions representing graduate workers, lecturers, and full-time faculty must approve them, a framework for agreement has been reached that would deliver significant gains in wages and other demands. 

Graduate Student Strikes Fight Back Against Decades of Austerity, Seek to Revive Opportunity

Participants in these actions explain that the goal isn't only pay and benefits for graduate student workers, but returning public higher education to a state of accessibility for millions of students and opportunity for millions of workers after decades of budget cuts and privatization. 

UC Strike is Energizing a Movement of Research Workers

Collective actions at the University of California campuses and elsewhere are influencing research workers to view the work that they do in the lab as labor. 

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. 

Is a College Progressive if Instructors Make Poverty Wages?

At the New School (as well as at image-minded companies like Starbucks) an educated workforce and a progressive clientele increasingly expects management's treatment of workers to match its stated values, writes Post columnist Helaine Olen. 

Students are the Key Swing Constituents in the UC Grad Worker Strike

Withholding grading labor as students return to campus after the COVID years is a risky move but at the New School, faculty built some solidarity with students that bolstered their position. Will that work in the University of California system? 

"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? 

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. 

The UC Grad Worker Strike is the Most Important Labor Action in the History of Higher Ed

by Nelson Lichtenstein

The strike aims not only at raising the pay of graduate workers and postdocs, but reversing the austerity politics that have gutted California's public higher education and created a climate of precarity for intellectual workers in the system. 

Railway Companies Aren't Simply Being Stingy: Denying Sick Days is Central to their Business Model

The regime of Precision-Scheduled Railroading (PSR) has yielded immense profits but cannot accommodate unexpected worker absences. The current impasse is happening because executives and stockholders refuse to abandon the system. 

An Open Letter from Historians In Support of Railway Workers

A group of historians hopes to persuade President Biden and Labor Secretary Martin Walsh to uphold railroad workers' right to strike and to intervene in negotiations to help secure a contract with sick day provisions. 

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. 

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. 

Alabama Women, Like Predecessors, are Keeping a Strike Alive

by Kim Kelly

The Warrior Met Coal strike in Alabama has been on for more than 600 days. Labor writer Kim Kelly links miners' endurance to the work of women workers, miners' wives, and other women in past labor struggles. 

Will the Philadelphia Museum Strike Change an Industry?

Will the success of the Philadelphia Museum of Art workers' strike help push more museums toward paying livable wages to their workers? 

48,000 UC Academic Workers Striking: You Can't Eat Prestige

"Without its armada of researchers and grad students, the UC system is essentially a baroque real estate scam." Those workers argue they deserve much more from the system in exchange for the labor that makes it run.