Alex N. Press is a staff writer at Jacobin who covers labor organizing.
The UAW has given the Big Three until noon tomorrow to make progress at the bargaining table or face a strike escalation. One week in, the historic walkout has already left politicians and bosses alike scrambling amid an utterly justified worker action.
The United Auto Workers, headed by a new reform leadership, are set to strike the Big Three automakers at midnight tonight. The entire working class will be watching to see if autoworkers can claw back decades of concessions and win a transformative contract.
The WGA strike is now in its fifth month. We spoke to Alex O’Keefe, former writer on FX’s The Bear, about the exhilarations and anxieties of striking and the fight to turn Hollywood into a place of solidarity and creativity rather than capitalist competition.
Most workers in the US are barred from claiming unemployment benefits if they go on strike, penalizing them for exercising one of their most fundamental rights. New legislation in California and elsewhere is trying to rectify that injustice.
Dollar General workers have long raised the alarm about their vulnerability to violence due to understaffing and lack of security. They were tragically proven correct in Jacksonville when a white man murdered three black people at a Dollar General.
Even after more than one hundred days of a nationwide strike of Hollywood writers, studio heads are monumentally out of touch with the most basic demands that those writers are unified around winning.
Independent unions are a real rarity in the US labor movement. But at multiple stores across the country, Trader Joe’s workers are organizing outside of established unions.
UAW president Shawn Fain has called for a 32-hour workweek. It’s the revival of an old vision in the US labor movement — and the sort of ambition overworked and underpaid employees need.
In declining to cancel its annual conference at Southern California hotels where workers are on strike, the American Political Science Association is refusing to sacrifice for workers whose cause is just. There’s a word for that: “cowardice.”
Like many corporations, Amazon has used subcontractors to avoid responsibility for working conditions and pay. A group of Palmdale, California, subcontracted workers wants to force Amazon to change that.
This week, the UAW presented proposals to automakers in contract negotiations covering some 150,000 workers. Autoworkers want big raises, an end to tiers, and the right to strike over plant closures — and conditions appear favorable for them to win.
Despite the ravages of deindustrialization, the United Auto Workers remains the most important American industrial union. Members recently elected a new leadership promising democracy, militancy, and an end to corruption. But change isn’t coming easy to the UAW.
On top of issues like low pay, workers are up against faceless algorithmic management that can punish them for various offenses — including for refusing to cross picket lines. Workers at a hotel in Southern California are on strike against this practice.
As both writers and actors are on the picket lines in Hollywood, the stakes couldn’t be higher: Will average entertainment workers be able to eke out a living in an industry awash in cash, or will studio executives use new tech like AI to gobble up all of it?
More than a year after the Amazon Labor Union’s landmark victory at a Staten Island warehouse, Amazon still refuses to bargain with the union. Meanwhile, a reform caucus is pushing for the ALU to hold leadership elections.
During the ongoing Hollywood writers’ strike, comedy writer Adam Conover has been a constant presence on picket lines and on social media, explaining what’s at stake for strikers and how the union plans to win. We spoke to him about the strike.
Today Teamsters are erecting practice picket lines as the July 31 expiration of their contract with UPS rapidly approaches. After negotiations broke down yesterday, the second-largest strike at a single employer in US history is a real possibility.
Under the banner of “Auditions Are Work,” a group of SAG-AFTRA members are organizing to enforce a little-known provision of their contract that guarantees pay for auditions. With many actors spending hours each week auditioning, there’s a lot to gain.
Workers at the Wabtec locomotive manufacturing plant in Erie, Pennsylvania, have walked off the job. Their demands get to the heart of bigger questions about the nature of work and the role workers can play in fights like climate change.
Just because you’re doing work for a massive company like Google doesn’t mean you’re technically working for them. And just because you’re a Google subcontractor doesn’t mean you can’t organize a union, as Ben Gwin and his coworkers did in Pittsburgh.