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David Montgomery, labor historian
(1927-2011) Please
click here
to read David’s 1999 New Labor Forum article
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Tea Party America and the Born-Again Politics of the Populist Right
By Darren Dochuk
On August 6, 2011, thirty thousand evangelicals gathered in Houston’s Reliant Stadium
for a time of prayer, preaching, fasting, and singing. The event planner’s hopes
for a momentous turnout were fulfilled. Performers petitioned God for help in rebuilding
society and, with each plea, intensity grew. The crescendo came when the event planner—Texas
Governor Rick Perry—appeared. With the gestures of a preacher—head bowed, hands
clasped, and voice reverberating—the governor beseeched divine authority. "Father,"
he entreated, "our hearts break for America….We have forgotten who made us,
who protects us, who blesses us, and for that, we cry out for your forgiveness."
Perry delivered scripted biblical injunctions, yet his listeners knew...
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The Feminization of Austerity
By Mimi Abramovitz
The current attack on public sector unions is the latest step in a long-term effort
to “end big government” through a three–pronged strategy that
falls heavily on women. The strategy targets three public sector groups: service
users, workers, andunions. Yet most of the prevailing analysis focuses on one group
or another and thus misses the whole story and the strategy’s wider impact,
particularly on white women and women of color—the people who comprise the
majority of public sector program users, workers, and union members. This is largely a result of the gender division of labor...
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What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Jobs: The Continuing
Scandal of African-American Joblessness
By Andy Kroll
Like the country it governs, Washington is a city of extremes. In a car, you can
zip in bare moments from northwest District of Columbia, its streets lined with
million-dollar homes and palatial embassies, its inhabitants sporting one of the
nation's lowest jobless rates, to Anacostia, a mostly forgotten neighborhood in
southeastern D.C. with one of the highest unemployment rates anywhere in America.
Or, if you happen to be jobless...
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Mobilizing the Unorganized: Is "Working America"
the Way Forward?
By Amy Dean
Given the dramatic decline of union membership, the U.S. labor movement needs to
reach out to a broader base of working- and middle-class Americans. Now more than
ever, nonunion workers need an advocate, within both the economic and political
realms.
This idea is at the heart of Working America, a national initiative established
in 2003 as the "community affiliate of the AFL-CIO." Working America now claims more than
three million members. Eight years after its creation, the organization has demonstrated
some impressive capabilities; but, at the same time...
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Uncle Sam Does(n’t) Want You
By Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman
Ventura, California not long ago passed an ordinance making it okay for the unemployed
and homeless to sleep in their cars. At the height of the Great Recession, a third
of the capital equipment of the U.S. economy lay idle. Of the women and men idled
along with that equipment, only 37 percent got any unemployment checks from the
government and that money averaged a mere 35 percent of their weekly wages. Meanwhile,
"ninety-niners," those who have maxed out their supplemental unemployment
benefits because they’ve been out of work for more than ninety-nine weeks, now number
two million. They comprise a division in...
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