Alex N. Press is a staff writer at Jacobin who covers labor organizing.
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.
Workers at the Erie, Pennsylvania, train manufacturing complex Wabtec are poised to walk off the job should they decide the company’s contract offer is insufficient. One of their main priorities is a rarity for US unions: the right to strike over grievances.
Barack Obama abandoned his commitments to unions, and many top staffers went to work for the gig economy. In his Netflix series Working, the former president bears witness to workers’ suffering as if it were immutable — and something he had nothing to do with.
The actors’ union SAG-AFTRA enters negotiations with studios today over a new contract. Members just returned a 97.91 percent vote in favor of authorizing a strike — meaning striking film and TV writers could soon be joined on the picket line by actors.
This summer could see 350,000 UPS workers walk off the job in the United States’ largest strike in decades. The Teamsters are getting ready. Here’s a look at how.
Workers say Dollar General continues to understaff its stores and pay poverty wages. The alleged violations have gotten so bad that, this week, shareholders defied the company’s board of directors and approved a proposed third-party audit of safety conditions.
Workers at the Crown Heights pizzeria Barboncino are organizing a union with Workers United. It would be the first pizzeria of its kind to go union in New York — and perhaps not the last.
Cartoonist Syd Hoff drew the rich as they are: ridiculous, incompetent, hopelessly out of touch, and boring.
The Writers Guild of America is now in week three of its nationwide strike. Two key sticking points in negotiations: residual payments and the use of artificial intelligence.
Far from being a white-collar oasis, architects work under grueling conditions — which is why some are now trying to unionize. We spoke to an architect and union organizer about labor’s new efforts to organize the industry.
Television shows across the country are going dark because their writers have walked off the job. The strikers say they had no choice but to walk, as new technology and the squeeze from executives have put their very livelihood in serious danger.
Unrest gives viewers plenty that they won’t find in films elsewhere: a quietly gorgeous portrayal of the labor process, a lead role for the anarchist geographer Pyotr Kropotkin, and an exploration of how bosses wrestle with workers over control of their work.
This May Day, don’t hang your head for the labor movement’s defeat. US unions are weak, it’s true. But there’s more excitement, more of a spirit of militancy and experimentation, and more hope in today’s labor movement than there has been in a long time.
Did the Teamsters just successfully negotiate the first tentative agreement for Amazon workers anywhere in America? The fact that the workers are subcontracted means the answer to that question isn’t cut and dry.
Earning less than minimum wage, suffering constant harassment and assault, even being ordered to continue delivering food after suffering a concussion on the job: food delivery drivers are toiling under incredibly brutal working conditions.
The luxury Midtown Athletic Club in Chicago told its housekeepers they would be laid off on May 1. The workers saw the move as retaliation for their organizing efforts — and when they went public, the club fired them again, effective immediately.
Members of the Writers Guild of America, which represents more than 11,000 television and feature writers, have voted almost unanimously to authorize a strike. The work stoppage could begin as soon as their contract expires on May 1.
Long-haul trucking used to be a stable, high-paying job. But thanks to decades of deregulation and pressure from bosses, truckers now have to work grueling hours for little pay, in conditions that put them and everyone else on the road in serious danger.
German director Uwe Boll was filming an NYPD drama in New York City last month. On the third day of shooting, crew members say that his producer showed up with a gun. Within a week, they were on strike.