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Men sitting in a bar, drinking and smoking in suits, implied to be members of the Mafia.

How Black Workers Challenged the Mafia

A story of intrigue and power involving union organizers, Black laundry workers, the Mafia, and the FBI in 1980s Detroit.
by Keith Kelleher via The Forge on November 19, 2024
Samuel Gompers giving a speech in front of a crowd with his arms open wide.

A Return to Gompers

Samuel Gompers, the Teamsters at the Republican National Convention, and where unions fit into party politics.
by Dustin Guastella via Jacobin on September 27, 2024
The Executive Board of UCAPAWA in 1937.

Challenging the New Deal’s “Contemptible Neglect”

In the midst of the Great Depression, one CIO union used the new administrative state to influence legislation on behalf of people considered outcasts.
by Jarod Roll via Nonsite on September 21, 2024
A row of colorful houses in New Orleans.

A Forgotten or Simply Erased History of Organized Labor

After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans replaced all its public schools with charter schools. A new book recovers the decades of work the storm disrupted.
by Daniel G. Cumming via The Metropole on July 22, 2024
General president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Sean O'Brien speaks during the first day of the 2024 Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, July 15, 2024.

A Return to Gompers

Sean O’Brien’s speech at the RNC may represent a return to nonpartisan realpolitik for unions. But does that reflect labor's strength or its decline?
by Dustin Guastella via Jacobin on July 17, 2024
Starbucks workers on strike.

The Paradox of the American Labor Movement

It’s a great time to be in a union—but a terrible time to try to start a new one.
by Michael Podhorzer via The Atlantic on April 18, 2024
Irma Sherman, Chair of McMaid Workers Organizing Committee.

How Four Black Women Changed Labor Organizing Forever

40 years ago in Chicago, McMaid workers sparked a movement.
by Keith Kelleher via The Forge on February 13, 2024
A small farmworker house in Ventura with children playing outside.

Reimagining Resistance, Reconstructing Community

Farmworker housing cooperatives in Ventura County, California.
by Frank P. Barajas via Tropics of Meta on January 12, 2024
Labor day parade

Just Transition: Learning From the Tactics of Past Labor Movements

It is time to recognize the power that organized labor can wield to fight for environmental, economic and social justice.
by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Dylan Plummer via The Trouble on October 12, 2023
Cover of a book on President Bill Clinton's failures.

The Left Can’t Stop Wondering Where Bill Clinton Went Wrong. The Answer Explains a Lot.

Clinton’s role in decoupling the Democratic Party from mainstream labor, first in Arkansas and then nationally, had dire consequences.
by Matthew E. Stanley, Paul M. Renfro via Slate on September 15, 2023
Disney strikers picketing the premiere of The Reluctant Dragon, Los Angeles, July 1941.

Storyboards and Solidarity

The current Hollywood strikes have a precedent in Disney’s golden age, when the company was a hothouse of innovation and punishing expectation.
by E. Tammy Kim via New York Review of Books on September 14, 2023
Poster of Kate Mullaney holding an iron in a fist above her head, with the words "Don't iron while the strike is hot."

Reopened Museum Honors Women's Fight for Fairness

Kate Mullany's former home in Troy, New York honors one of the earliest women's labor unions that sought fair pay and safe working conditions.
by Ann Morrow via American Heritage on September 13, 2023
Black and white photo of the dressmaker union on strike

Strike Waves Across the US Seem Big, but the Number of People on Strike Remains Historically Low

Many of the reasons for strikes now mirror the motives that workers had for walking off the job in decades past.
by Judith Stepan-Norris, Jasmine Kerrissey via The Conversation on August 24, 2023
Ruth Ehrlich and Aileen Hernandez sitting next to each other at a National Organization for Women event.

Labor Union Radicals Built the US Feminist Movement

Labor radicals played a crucial role in organizing the struggles to topple gender hierarchies, and should serve as an inspiration for labor feminists today.
by Katherine Turk via Jacobin on August 9, 2023
Demonstrators march with t-shirts and signs in support of labor unions.
partner

Labor Union Activism Is on the Rise, Recalling the Great Depression

Spurred by the pandemic, new groups of workers are pushing to form unions in activism not seen since the 1930s.
via Retro Report on March 23, 2023
Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake holds a news conference as she tours the U.S.-Mexico border on Nov. 4 in Sierra Vista, Ariz.
partner

Cochise County Didn’t Used To Be the Land Of Far Right Stunts

How the rural Arizona border county embodies the political shift in much of America.
by Katherine Benton-Cohen via Made By History on December 2, 2022
Lieutenant Governor Garlin Gilchrist, left, holding up hands with Governor Gretchen Whitmer, right, both smiling.
partner

Michigan Democrats Can Reignite Their State’s Vaunted Labor Tradition

A historic victory in the midterm elections will let Democrats repeal the state’s right-to-work laws and return to its labor roots.
by Ken Wohl via Made By History on November 17, 2022
People holding union and BLM signs out of their car windows, taking part in the Workers First Caravan for Racial and Economic Justice, June 17, 2020, with the US capitol in the background.
partner

How Conservatives Drove a Wedge Between Economic and Cultural Liberals

Elites understood that a unified left spelled doom for their economic advantages.
by Jonathan Schlefer via Made By History on June 14, 2022
Drawings of protest sign reading "Workers of the world unite" with an asterisk, and another smaller one reading "Not You."

Redefining the Working Class

The diminished status of the non-white working class is not a matter of accident, but of design.
by Shamira Ibrahim via The Baffler on May 3, 2022
Members of the Amazon Labor Union celebrating

How Did Amazon Workers Go Against a Rich Corporation and Win? Look Back 100 Years.

We don’t need to overanalyze it. It came down to genuine solidarity that the Amazon Labor Union organizing committee built among themselves and their co-workers.
by Kim Kelly via NBC News on April 4, 2022
Picture of Maida Springer Kemp and two other young African American women colleagues.

Maida Springer Kemp Championed Workers’ Rights on a Global Scale

The Panamanian garment worker turned labor organizer, Pan-Africanist, and anti-colonial activist advocated for US and African workers amid a Cold War freeze.
by Kim Kelly via The Nation on February 4, 2022
Wyatt at podium giving speech

The Indomitable Rev. Addie L. Wyatt

The trailblazing Black labor leader and civil rights activist took her fight for equality from the packinghouse to the pulpit.
by Kim Kelly via The Nation on January 11, 2022
A wide shot of the Inventing Worlds and Characters: Encounters, Stories of Cinema 3 exhibit at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures with ephemera from "Black Panther," "Star Wars," and "Dark Crystal."

At the Academy Museum, Hollywood's Own Labor History is Left Unexamined

'Isn’t this supposed to be the museum of the motion picture industry?' a historian asks. 'They forgot about the industry part.'
by Andy Lewis via Los Angeles Times on November 7, 2021
Exterior of Capital City Public Charter School in Northwest Washington, D.C.
partner

Organized Teachers Dreamed Up Charter Schools — But Their Vision Got Hijacked

Finally embracing teachers' original vision could help us rethink education after covid.
by Jon Hale via Made By History on August 25, 2021
A man sitting on a table.

A More Perfect Union

On the Black labor organizers who fought for civil rights after Reconstruction and through the twentieth century.
by Arvind Dilawar via Lapham’s Quarterly on November 16, 2020
A group of men gather at a headquarters of the Communist Party USA following a protest demanding pay raise and an end to police brutality, US, circa 1920. Hirz / Archive Photos / Getty

How McCarthyism and the Red Scare Hurt the Black Freedom Struggle

Union activists linked the struggle for black equality in housing, employment, and at the ballot box, to the broader struggle against capitalist domination.
by Paul Heideman via Jacobin on May 21, 2020

State of the Unions

What happened to America’s labor movement?
by Caleb Crain via The New Yorker on August 26, 2019
A broken key with a fist

The Road Not Taken

The shuttering of the GM works in Lordstown will also bury a lost chapter in the fight for workers’ control.
by Sarah Jaffe via The New Republic on June 24, 2019
United Mine Workers on a picket line.

The Past and Future of the American Strike

A new book tells the history of America through its workplace struggles.
by Richard Yeselson via The Nation on March 21, 2019
Martin Luther King Junior in a picket line wearing a sign that reads "employees on strike for a living wage."

Martin Luther King Jr., Union Man

Most people think of Martin Luther King Jr. as a civil rights leader. What many don’t know is that he also championed labor unionism.
by Peter Cole via The Conversation on January 18, 2019
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