Category: Organizing Labor
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Report reveals “Fair Trade” labels as a form of business self-regulation, not international solidarity
Critics of ethical certifications like Fair Trade USA and EFI mostly decry them as just more corporate PR. But our research shows the standards are worse than useless—they’re creating a parallel realm of corporate-friendly private regulation. Instead of democratic union elections, farmworkers on certified farms are offered a spot on a committee with management. And…
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How to Organize in High Turnover Jobs
By Jenny Brown for Labor Notes, published May 22nd 2023 Original article here. When the Amazon Labor Union first submitted union authorization cards, “we had to withdraw and file again,” recalled organizing committee member Justine Medina, “because Amazon challenged over 1,000 of our signatures saying they no longer worked there.” The sky-high turnover at the…
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Independent, locally focused unions are expanding the playing field for workers’ rights
While union efforts at corporate giants have gained the most national attention, labor organizing is also happening in businesses less accustomed to unionization, including small restaurants, the video game industry, museums, newsrooms, theaters, the arts, and nonprofit organizations. These unions are on the front lines of developing new ways of operating to bring new groups…
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#FeesMustFall -South Africa’s Student Movement for Free Education
Beginning in October of 2015, South Africa’s #FeesMustFall movement has gone on to send shockwaves through a country struggling with the ever persistent issues of shrinking public budgets, mass unemployment and poverty. As a result, almost every year since, tens of thousands of students take to the streets to demand the right to free education.
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The Battle at NagaWorld
A bitter, protracted labor dispute in the poverty-stricken country of Cambodia has revealed the true nature of a brutal system where wealth and power is violently held onto by a tiny ruling elite.
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Strikes, protests, collective action: “hustling” wasn’t always how workers fought to afford living costs
Most people today are coping with the rising cost of living individually: cost cutting, looking for a better paid job, taking on “side hustles”, and so on. But not so long ago, many workers globally and in Aotearoa New Zealand approached the same problem in far more collective ways.
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No Union? You Still Have a Right to Strike
Written by Richard de Vries, originally published by LaborNotes on December 08, 2022. Shared per LaborNotes republishing policy. Last year there were 87 strikes by non-union workers, according to Cornell’s Labor Action Tracker, accounting for one-third of all work stoppages in the U.S. Even without a union, you have the legal right to organize strikes, job…
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EndSARS, Workers’ Power, and War
Written by Kunle Wizeman Ajayi, originally published in October of 2021 on africaisacountry.com The working class that organized #OccupyNigeria should collaborate with #EndSARS. If these two boiling points burn together to produce the fire next time, a new Nigeria will be possible. The present shape of Nigeria’s ruling-class oppression goes back to the mid-1980s, with…
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Union from the Start (You Don’t Have to Wait)
Win a union election, and it’s a long road to a signed contract. Lose a union election, and workers may think the fight is over. But win, lose, or not even close to an election, workers at all kinds of workplaces can fight for their unions and win demands here and now. It’s a strategy…
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New Book Labor Power and Strategy Helps Organizers Think Seriously About Chokepoints
By Peter Olney and Rand Wilson for LaborNotes, published Feb. 15th 2023 John Womack is well-known in the United States as one of the foremost historians of the Mexican revolution, as the author of the seminal Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. However, his writings on strategic sectors and strategic workers have not received the same attention.…
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