Nowadays, the name Harry Bridges elicits no response from the average American. Some San Francisco Bay Area residents might connect his name to the large plaza outside the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero running alongside the bay.
Read more →Increasing inequality is a pressing problem requiring serious research and vigorous debate as we strive for policies that improve people’s opportunities and outcomes. One direct way to tackle this challenge is to confront the problem of pay, especially in the United States, where our public culture has long correlated hard work with personal worth and our public policies have wedded social benefits to employment via tax credits, health care insurance and pensions.
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Jonathan Kissam, historian and Communications Director for United Electrical Workers Union, digs into the past for some ideas for the future, in a post originally written for their website blog.
Read more →Most Americans know that a white racist assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4,1968 – fifty years ago. But few understand the historical context and why King was in Memphis.
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Ed Sadlowski passed away yesterday. His life is a testament to the grit of the leftwing Midwestern union militants. His roots in unionism go back to the Southern Illinois coalfields and the Steel Workers Organizing Committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations of the 1930s.
Read more →While Margo Price’s concerns are political through and through, she isn’t hosting any pity parties. Many of her songs rock, countering the sobering lyrics.
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Michael K. Honey is the author of the new study, To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice, to be published on the 50th anniversary of King’s April 4, 1968 assassination. He was interviewed by Charles Williams of the Against the Current editorial board.
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On Feb. 1, 1968, Echol Cole and Robert Walker were crushed to death while riding out a cold, driving rainstorm in the back of an outmoded “packer” garbage truck in Memphis. Unsafe working conditions, racism and abuse had long been intolerable for the city’s 1,300 sanitation workers.
Read more →Steven Parfitt, who spoke at LAWCHA’s Seattle conference, asks LAWCHA members to support the ongoing lecturers’ strike in the UK by contributing to the University and College Union’s “fighting fund.” As Steven notes, “I know that at my branch, and many other branches, this fund is being used particularly to help contingent faculty who want to strike but can’t afford to do so otherwise.”
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Liz Faue’s new book, Rethinking the American Labor Movement, is our field’s newest attempt to reinterpret U.S. Labor History. I asked her a to tell us a little bit more about the arc of her interpretation.
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