CA is Leader in Higher Wage Movement
California is the epicenter for a nationwide grassroots movement to raise the wage floor for American workers. On January 1st, the state set $15 an hour as the floor for large employers and $14 an hour for small ones (rising to $15 for all in 2023).
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“Protest” or “hunger strike?” Officials at the Robert N. Davoren complex (R.N.D.C.), a jail part of the Rikers Island correctional facility, have offered conflicting statements on the actions of a group of detainees who protested their living conditions on January 8th.
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Labor Online interviewed Jacob Zumoff about his new book, The Red Thread: The Passaic Textile Strike last year. In the course of the interview he mentioned the way that this strike creatively used film to build support for the workers cause.
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Jason Resnikoff’s essay The Paradox of Automation: QWERTY and the Neuter Keyboard is now available with free access until March 31, 2022 of Labor: Working Class Studies of the Americas. The essay gives new perspectives on how typing, considered one of the “office wife” service duties, became “neutered,” in the late twentieth century.
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Please share these freely available articles with your colleagues and students.
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According to a recent study by the AFL-CIO, on average 275 workers in the United States die each day due to job injuries and illnesses caused by working in unsafe spaces. In Canada, a 2020 report indicates 1,027 workers died of work-related causes in 2018, marking an increase of 76 from 2017.
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Bob Rossi is a long-time member of the Slovenska Narodna Podporna Jednota, (SNPJ) who has interviewed and corresponded with dozens of SNPJ members in writing a history of the 1920s coalfield culture and union battles. This post is derived from a presentation he gave to SNPJ Lodge #371 in Cle Elum, Washington in September.
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This post, originally published on November 4, has been updated with an exchange between the filmmaker and the reviewer. -Editor
Betrayal: When the Government Took Over the Teamsters Union, a recent (2019) documentary by George Bogdanich, asks critical questions about the decades long oversight of the Teamsters by the federal government.
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Since the 1980s, Bob Rossi has been working on a social history of Colorado coal mining communities and an account of the 1927–28 Colorado mine workers’ strike. A part of this work has entailed documenting the lives of Syrian and Lebanese families in the Colorado coalfields.
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David Witwer and Catherine Rios recently published Murder in the Garment District: The Grip of Organized Crime and the Decline of Labor in the United States. It tells of racketeering and union corruption in 20th century New York, when unions and the mob shaped working class lives.
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