posts from the year2019

Marla Miller on her new book, Entangled Lives

by on December 12, 2019

Our series of interviews with authors of new books in labor and working-class history continues. This month, Johns Hopkins University Press publishes Marla Miller’s new book, Entangled Lives: Labor, Livelihood, and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts. Miller, the director of the Public History Program and a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, answered questions from Jacob Remes.

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Jimmy Hoffa: Symbol of a Bygone Era

by on December 2, 2019

Jimmy Hoffa used to say he’d be forgotten ten years after his death. This was an uncharacteristically unintelligent judgment. Forty-four years after his murder on July 30, 1975, Hoffa is still famous enough that one of the most celebrated movies of 2019, The Irishman, is about the man who claims to have killed him, Frank Sheeran.

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The Red Scare and Radical Unionism

by on November 29, 2019

One hundred years ago this November, a small army of federal agents, backed by police and vigilantes, launched the first of a series of incursions on radical groups that would come to be known as the Palmer Raids, after Attorney General A.

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Research on Graduate Assistants & Right to Unionize Challenges NLRB proposed rule

by , on November 27, 2019

On November 20, 2019, National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, Hunter College, City University of New York submitted comments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in response to its proposed rule to exclude graduate assistants and student employees from coverage under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). 

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Graduate Workers: We ARE Workers, and We Need Unions.

by on November 17, 2019

Last month, the National Labor Relations Board proposed a new rule that would reclassify graduate workers at private institutions as students, not workers, and therefore rescind their collective bargaining rights. By claiming graduate workers’ relationship to their university is primarily educational and not economic, the majority-Trump-appointed NLRB threatens to undermine decades of labor organizing.

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White Middle-Class Racism

by on November 17, 2019

What do you picture when someone refers to the “Trump’s base”? If you’ve watched television coverage of his rallies or read any of the dozens of articles in which reporters and commentators try to explain Trump’s appeal, then you probably imagine white people wearing “MAGA” hats and t-shirts chanting “Lock her up

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