Category: Organizing Labor
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To Transform Work, Start with Schools
By RUBEN ABRAHAMS BROSBE, originally published by Yes! Magazine Not long ago, before the pandemic, I was teaching fourth grade. One of my students, a quiet boy who wore his hair in a long ponytail, hated school. Much of the content felt overwhelming for him, and so he would often run out of the classroom. …
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What Can Unions Do Now to Defend Abortion Rights?
By Sarah Hughes, originally posted on LaborNotes The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health on June 24 overturned the Roe v. Wade precedent, erasing the constitutional right to an abortion. Already for years, large parts of the U.S. have severely restricted abortion—especially hurting those least likely to have resources to travel for care, including poor, Black,…
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Towards a Student Unionism
By Jasper Conners Original PDF edition below Introduction The current crisis of capitalism confronts and a drastic decrease in the real-world returns from a college degree. Not only is it harder to afford college, but we’re coming out of it with more debt and fewer job opportunities. It seems like a four year degree only…
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The most recent efforts to combat teacher shortages don’t address the real problems
Henry Tran, University of South Carolina and Douglas A. Smith, Iowa State University States have recently focused their efforts to reduce the nation’s teacher shortage by promoting strategies that “remove or relax barriers to entry” to quickly bring new people into the teaching profession. California, for example, allows teacher candidates to skip basic skills and…
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Run This Town: Building Class Power in the City
Posted originally on linchpin.ca (now defunct) By Three Hamilton Members, One Toronto Member of Common Cause The Marxist urbanist Henri Lefebvre wrote that the working class is made out of urban material. His point was that to understand the working class and to organize it, one had to look at everyday working class life from…
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The Seattle Solidarity Network: A New Kind of Working Class Social Movement
By Walter Winslow, found on LibCom.org SeaSol offers an alternative strategy for how to begin organizing in an anti-union era. Its founding members realized that the IWW simply cannot organize workers at this point in the 21st century in droves as it did in the early 20th century. In fact, the IWW as well as…
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Indigenous People still Face Slavery in Brazil
Story by Lais Modelli, English translation by Maya Johnson Originally published on Mongabay Since Brazil began recording cases of workers found working in slavery-like conditions in 2004, 1,640 Indigenous people have been rescued from these situations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 100 Indigenous people have been found working in these conditions. Sugarcane harvesting, which a…
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The 2012 Quebec Student General Strike
Originally published at studentstrike.net (now defunct), CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 Printable PDF pamphlet below Introduction In February 2012, students in Quebec launched an unlimited general strike to fight back against a 75% hike in university tuition fees. Contrary to the expectations of many, the strike movement lasted more than six months, morphing into one of the largest periods…
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Women and Labor: Key Struggles in the MENA Region
Embodying the intersection of gender and class, women trade union leaders are essential to the goals of ending gender violence and promoting women empowerment By Valentine M. Moghadam for ROAR Mag ow do women and gender equality measures advance in a context of conflict, climate change, high unemployment, low labor force participation, limited democratization and…
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Know, Hear, See: A Practical Organizing Concept
Part 1 and Part 2 originally published by The Industrial Worker, found online in the Southern Maine IWW Library: Weakening the Dam Part 1 Know the Union, Hear the Union, See the Union On a 100 degree summer day I was in Stockton, at the Sikh temple meeting room. A middle aged trucker with a…
