posts categorized asLaborOnline
The Oppositional Politics of Race and Class in the Brexit Debate
I live in a relatively affluent predominantly white neighbourhood in the South of England. One day in the city centre I am approached by an older white homeless man; he is weaving, unwashed, I can smell alcohol on his breath. He asks me for money and I politely refuse, as I feel uncertain and unsafe.
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Becoming a Feminist, Becoming a Labor Historian: an Interview with Alice Kessler-Harris
“We’re All in this Together”
For the past forty years, Alice Kessler-Harris has been on the vanguard of labor history and of women’s and gender history. Last summer, I joined Tony Michels and Annie Polland in a wide-ranging conversation with Kessler-Harris about her life and work.
Read more →LAWCHA at OAH
LAWCHA is pleased to have solicited and endorsed several panels at the 2019 OAH Conference in Philadelphia. We hope to see you there.
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Jobs and Medicare for All
You can tell that Medicare for All is becoming a real possibility when it gets a rigorous cost-benefit analysis and when its advocates start seriously raising and addressing the inevitable downsides of the policy. There is no greater downside to Medicare for All than the 1.8 million clerical and administrative jobs it will eliminate in the insurance industry and in health providers’ offices.
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Share the Wealth
There is a growing awareness that wealth inequality is directly affecting everyman. All politicians recite the pledge to help the middle class, republicans with more supply side solutions and democrats with tax plans.
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The Strange Career of “the Working Class” in US Political Culture Since the 1950s: An Introduction
The working class currently has remarkable visibility in US political culture. In defiance of a longstanding belief in America’s classlessness, even today’s sitting president publicly acknowledges America’s “working class.” However dramatically Donald Trump is breaking some political norms, though, the particular way he uses the phrase working class is completely consistent with trends that have been emerging within mainstream US politics for decades.
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American Socialism, Revisited
Paul Buhle reviews The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History, by Jack Ross (2015)
Read more →Sleeping Giant: When Public Workers Awake
It was the radical African-American intellectual, W.E.B. Du Bois, who famously called the mass disaffection and migration of southern slaves to Union battle lines in the Civil War a “general strike.”
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The Ghosts of Bisbee
Bisbee ‘17 is a documentary about an Arizona town facing its ghosts. In June 1917, when copper miners organized by the Industrial Workers of the World had gone on strike for two weeks, 1200 striking workers were rounded up and “deported” to New Mexico.
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