|
David Montgomery, labor historian (1927-2011)
Please click here to read David’s 1999 New Labor Forum article
|
 State and Municipal Alternatives to Austerity
By Robert Pollin and Jeff Thompson
The pitched battle in Wisconsin last winter over the collective bargaining
rights of public sector workers was only the most dramatic expression of a
struggle that is ongoing throughout the country over the future of state and
local governments. For generations now, state and local governments have been
the most important providers in the United States of education, health care,
public safety, and other vital forms of social support. State and local
governments are also, collectively, the largest employer in the country,
responsible for creating thirty million jobs, either directly or through
purchasing supplies or services from private businesses. This is 20 percent of
the U.S. workforce. The stakes in this battle are obviously huge. Read
More
|
The Egyptian Uprising: The Mass Strike in the Time of Neoliberal Globalization
By Michael Schwartz
As the Arab Spring became an Arab Summer, the failure of other uprisings to replicate the regime changes in Tunisia and Egypt has raised important questions about these increasingly impressive successes. With this in mind, I want to scrutinize Egypt carefully, looking for the points of leverage that allowed and impelled the movement to oust Hosni Mubarak in only eighteen days of protest with low mortality counts, particularly in light of the much longer and far more lethal and less successful uprisings...  Read
More
|
 The Excluded Workers Congress: Reimagining the Right to Organize
By Harmony Goldberg and Randy Jackson
Even before the recent assault on the collective bargaining rights of public sector workers in Wisconsin and across the Midwest, millions of workers in the United States were excluded from the basic human right to organize. Whether it's due to policy or practice, they cannot organize without facing retaliation, bargain collectively to transform their workplace conditions, or access basic labor protections. In short, millions of workers have been robbed of their dignity.
Read
More
|
How the P'urhépechas Came to Southern California's Coachella Valley
By David Bacon
Pierce Street sounds like an avenue in any city old enough to name a street after a nineteenth-century president. In the Coachella Valley, though, Pierce Street is a narrow blacktop running through sagebrush and desiccated palms, across alkali-crusted sand. Heading toward the Salton Sea a dozen miles south of Coachella, the nearest incorporated town, Pierce Street passes the Duros trailer camp.
The desert here belongs to the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians, a Native American tribe whose name for themselves is Mau-Wal-Mah Su-Kutt Menyil, or Deer Moon Among the Palms. In 1876, when the U.S. government...
Read
More
|
 A Brief History of Opposition to Public Sector Unionism
By Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman
There is nothing new about opposition to public sector unionism. It has been a feature of American life for over a hundred years. But in some ways, the current wave of anti-unionism is a departure. Three different eras of opposition to public sector unionism, including the current one, have been distinguished by distinct core arguments against collective bargaining for public employees. From the early 1900s through the 1960s, opposition to public sector unionism largely rested on the idea that it undercut the sovereignty of government. Unions of government employees were unusual during this period, though... Read
More
|
|
|