Tag: work
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Collective Action is the Only Answer to a Global Garment Industry Driven by Debt, Wage Theft and Coercion
Cases like the labour abuse in Mauritius are conspicuous and show new connections between modern slavery and migration. But these cases are enabled by centuries of colonial and neo-colonial organisation of production that has involved unacceptable forms of worker exploitation. The analysis of the disputes in our study clearly suggests that social justice is only…
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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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Digital Capitalism is a Mine not a Cloud
Big Tech seeks through abstractions of the ‘cloud’ to hide the depletion of nature and the exploitation and surveillance of labour that lies at the heart of its project to commodify data.
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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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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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To get off fossil fuels, the US is going to need a lot more electricians
This story was produced in partnership with Post Script Media and Canary Media. You can listen to the podcast version here. This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here Chanpory Rith, a 42-year-old product designer at the software company Airtable, bought a house in Berkeley, California, with his partner at the…
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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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