Tag: organizing
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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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When activist burnout was a problem 50 years ago, this group found a solution
Our first decision was to adopt the proposal of long-time activists George and Lillian Willoughby to put training together with cooperative living, in a center. Learning together, in a supportive community, would handle anxiety by emphasizing over and over, “It’s not all about you, it’s about us. Together we’ll learn to make a difference.”
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Liberatory Education 101
First, attend to how you see yourself in the process of radicalizing others. Are you treating other people as vessels in which you can pour your “superior” knowledge into? If so, the radicalisation process, if it proceeds at all, is likely to be an unnecessarily arduous one. Liberatory education is a process of mutual growth and is…
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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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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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Louisville’s Tenant Union is Part of a Growing Movement
Written by Fran Quigley for Waging Non-Violence, published on March 10th, 2023 under CC-BY 4.0 Despite the South’s challenging political geography, Black and white tenants are transforming Louisville and setting the pace for the wider movement. Private police officers guide a line of late-model SUVs through the January morning’s cold rain into a lane of…
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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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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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UAW Members are on the Verge of Taking Back their Union
Stephen J. Silvia, American University School of International Service A fight for control of the United Auto Workers union is coming to a head in a historic election that’s expected to give rank-and-file workers a greater voice and could ultimately end decades of declining blue-collar compensation in this key sector of the economy. Ballot counting…
