$15 per Hour or Bust: An Appraisal of the Higher Wages Movement
In the past two years, cities and states have been establishing and raising minimum wages to wage levels much higher
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Spring 2015
Working Graveyard
Once, at the end of his shift, he came out and in the first slant light the parking lot glittered
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Protecting the Future: A Strategic Proposal to Stop Climate Change
The weekend of September 21, 2014, people in 162 countries joined 2,646 events to demand global reductions in the greenhouse gas [GHG] emissions that are generating climate catastrophe. An estimated 40,000 marched in London; 30,000 in Melbourne; 25,000 in Paris. Some 400,000 joined the People’s Climate March through the center of New York City. The climate protection movement had come a long way since 2006, when a march of 1,000 through Burlington, Vermont proved to be the largest climate protest in American history.
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Volume 24, Issue 2 Contents From the Editorial Team Under the Radar By Sarah Jaffe Unreported and under-reported news and
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Marxism and Little Magazines: Gathering in the Newest Left
When I entered graduate school in English literature in 2007, like many others I did so under the impression that anything could pass as “studying literature,” and that I was secretly training to be an intellectual. To study literature in the 2000s obviously meant different things at different universities. But there is no doubt that the reputation of English departments, in places like the New York Times, invariably meant that they were hothouses of what is called “Theory,” a politicized blend of philosophy from German and French (mostly left-wing) thinkers of the 1960s and 1970s.
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Sex Workers Join the Indian Labor Movement
Sex worker activists have long argued that sex work is work like any other work. But what are the prospects for sex worker collective action inspired by the labor movement? The labor of sex falls outside the purview of the traditional trade union: sex workers are partly criminalized, often with no fixed “employer” with whom to negotiate, and operate through a range of often contingent work arrangements, from gift-based relationships with a few long-term partners to highly organized brothel work.
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Does the Working Families Party Work? An Appraisal of 25 Years of Semi-Independent Politics
For a long time, labor and progressives have had essentially one electoral strategy: elect Democrats, and hope for the best. Every cycle, prominent progressives issue statements that somehow, this time, things will be different. Somehow, they never are. A prominent labor movement strategist recently put the matter bluntly: “in election after election the labor movement and other progressives have been arguing that . . . the Democrats must run on an aggressive, populist, economic message.
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Green Capitalism Won’t Work
For the last 20 years, unions in the U.S. and internationally have generally accepted the dominant discourse on climate policy, one that is grounded in assumptions that private markets will lead the “green transition,” reduce emissions, and stabilize the climate over the longer term. Indeed, unions began attending the climate negotiations convened by the UN in the early 1990s, a time when the “triumph of the market” went unchallenged and the climate debate was awash with neoliberal ideas. Unions therefore focused on articulating the need for “Just Transition” policies.
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