Earth to Labor: Dispatches from the Climate Battleground
Corbyn’s Class Act is a Climate Game Changer On September 12, 2015, Jeremy Corbyn was elected the leader of the
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Featured stories, news, opinions, reviews, poetry & arts, and other content from the latest issue of the New Labor Forum.
Trade Unions and Climate Change: A Conversation with Naomi Klein and Jeremy Corby (Video)
Sean Sweeney was in Paris during COP21 where Unions are fighting for a reference in the final agreement to “a just
Read MoreFrom The Editorial Team | Winter 2016
The ghosts of Eugene Debs and Richard Nixon haunt the American political landscape. Whether the extraordinary presidential campaign of Brooklyn-born
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Indentured Studenthood: The Higher Education Act and the Burden of Student Debt
Promising to do something about student debt has become the means for politicians to pretend they are doing something for the 99 percent. That was true even before the 2016 election campaign really got underway. Obama, after all, promised two free years of community college in his 2015 State of the Union address. That idea, like so many others from Republicans and Democrats, did not go anywhere, even though the most recent re-authorization of the 1965 Higher Education Act (HEA) expired in 2013. However, inaction is not just a symptom of Washington gridlock. The reality is that paying for college is a confounding, sprawling sector of the economy involving loans, grants, scholarships, and tax credits.
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Marxism and Consumer Culture
Our obsession with the question of what sort of consciousness attaches itself most readily to the culture of consumption has paradoxically blinded us to the ways in which the ideal type of the American consumer has achieved a new level of uncontested sovereignty in the political rhetoric of our market culture.
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Queer Precarity and the Myth of Gay Affluence
The LGBT movement’s laser-focus on marriage equality propagates the myth of gay and lesbian affluence as political strategy, leaving aside any analysis of class or economic inequality or poverty—much less an analysis of capitalism. LGBT people are typically depicted as affluent consumers with high disposable incomes, yet this is hardly the norm. The majority of LGBT/Q people are poor or working class, female, and people of color, who struggle to get a job or hold onto one, to pay their rent and care for themselves and the people they love.
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Bernie Sanders and Progressive Democrats
Electing Bernie Sanders won’t be easy. But remapping ‘the left-wing of the possible’ (to use a Michael Harrington phrase) is within reach, changing the political landscape for our issues and associated social movements going forward.
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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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Notes on the Future of Greece
Why has the new Greek government failed to accomplish so much of what it had promised? And where does that leave the Greek labor movement? The government’s and the labor movement’s problems stem from the same fact, which has endured since the February 2012 signing of the second bailout agreement: Greece is no longer a sovereign nation state. It cannot implement any fiscal policy without the troika’s support, backed principally by the German government, and since the terms of Greece’s bailout agreement require austerity, any deviation threatens the financial assistance that enables Greece to avoid defaulting on its debts.
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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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