posts categorized asLaborOnline Features

French Workers Fight to Maintain 35-Hour Work Week

by on March 23, 2016

French workers are fighting to maintain their 35 hour work week. Adopted in February of 2000, as part of the platform of France’s Socialist Party, it became effective in 2002. Now, despite no ill effects in productivity the MEDEF, or the “Movement of the Enterprises of France,” which is an employer’s union, is pressing for a return to the past.

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Oaxaca Teachers Still Fighting Corporate Education Reforms

by on February 26, 2016

Ten years ago, one of the most radical unions in the hemisphere, the Sección XXII of Mexico’s National Education Workers’ Union (SNTE), led a vibrant movement against the state governor’s heavy-handed rule in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. The demonstrations, known to many as the “Oaxaca Commune,” featured six months of mass marches, public encampments, and neighborhood barricades.

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“We’ll just live within our means then!”: A Reaction to UW-Madison Graduate School Administration’s Proposal to “Restructure” Graduate Employee Pay

by on December 7, 2015

After briefly skimming over the potential effects of the proposed restructuring of pay for graduate assistants, I found myself jadedly stunned by the UW-Madison administration’s most recent attack on the quality of higher education, specifically with regard to the Humanities, at Wisconsin’s prized flagship and world-renowned institution.

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Woodrow Wilson and Anti-Unionists

by on December 1, 2015

How should Americans remember Woodrow Wilson? This is the central question triggered recently by Princeton University protesters who have brought attention to his racism. The protesters have rightly pointed out the loathsome words and actions of the turn-of-the-century pro-segregationist academic, former Princeton head, and two-term United States president.

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Fighting Inequality through Teaching, Scholarship and Activism: A Roundtable Discussion on the Career of Jim Barrett

by on September 25, 2015

For five-days “Fighting Inequality” conference (May 2015) participants critically considered ways, then and now, that working-class people experience and struggle against class inequality. One of the conference’s highlights was the session, “Fighting Inequality through Teaching, Scholarship and Activism: A Roundtable Discussion on the Career of Jim Barrett” where panelists shared ways that Barrett’s contributions to the field of labor and working class history offer an inspiring model of how to balance scholarly excellence with civic engagement.

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Empire of Cotton Still Based on Violence

by on July 10, 2015

At the recent LAWCHA conference here in Washington, D.C., I was among those applauding heartily when Empire of Cotton: A Global History, Sven Beckert’s sweeping study, received the Philip Taft Labor History Book Award. It’s worth taking a look at how the “empire,” carries on today, as Beckert asserts.

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