Ever wonder if it’s safe to bring an artichoke to lunch when you’re trying to convince someone to speak up on the job? Want to know how a Tampax machine can help you make progress at the bargaining table? Did you hear what happened to the boss who ordered his secretary to sew up a hole in his pants while he was wearing them?
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At least five years before Mexican labor activist Caritina Piña arrived in the working-class barrio of Villa Cecilia in the outskirts of Tampico, Reynalda González Parra had co-founded one of the most radical labor collectives in the entire world. It was 1915 and amid one of the bloodiest revolutions of the twentieth century González Parra, alongside Mexican, Spanish, and other activists, founded the Tampico local of the Casa del Obrero Mundial (COM)—the House of the Global Worker.
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In 2021, the radical publisher, Charles H. Kerr, published a “memoir” by the late Noel Ignatiev (1940-2019), Acceptable Men Life in the Largest Steel Mill in the World. Rather than review the book, Labor OnLine decided instead to convene a conversation with four activist-scholars who could shed light on Noel’s experience at US Steel, and offer their own critique of his account of working life there.
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Donna Haverty-Stacke recently published The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic, Socialist, Feminist, available from New York University Press. Haverty-Stacke examines Grace Holmes Carlson’s commitment to revolutionary Marxism and Catholicism in her life-long battles against social and economic inequality.
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The new issue of the journal Labor: Studies in Working-Class History is out, and we are pleased to move Janet K. Weaver’s essay from behind the paywall for three months, thanks to Duke University Press. It’s an essay on a young Iowa woman who tried to make unions a force for change more than a hundred years ago.
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Jenny Carson profiles some of the dynamic early leaders of the New York laundry workers union uprising of the 1930s, and how their fight for a democratic union met resistance from a notable CIO union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. It is a window into her longer treatment in A Matter of Moral Justice, published by University of Illinois Press –editor
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John Logan updates us on the spunky Starbucks workers campaign against the Goliath of union avoidance, asks what the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is doing or could do to help, including his perspective on how this fits into the long history of the National Labor Relations Act and union-busting tactics.
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It has been an exciting weekend for the North American labor movement with the Amazon Labor Union victory taking centre stage – adding to the victories of recent precarious service-sector workers who have organized against other corporate behemoths like Starbucks.
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In the past twenty years, I have been told time and again about how it is nearly impossible to organize Amazon, Starbucks, Wal-Mart and so many other leading workplaces until we get the Pro-Act, card-check (various government laws to make unionization easier to attain.)
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