Front-line workers in the covid-19 fight need unions
New Deal-era labor laws must be refreshed and improved to support and empower today’s essential workers.
Read more →posts categorized asOpEd
When the Home Is a Workplace
In California, new legislation would expand the rules of the Occupational Health and Safety Act to cover all workers—if domestic workers and their allies have their way.
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Could Regional Reparations Help the Democrats Retake the Rust Belt?
States such as Ohio and Michigan have been hit with blight and economic downturn. Offering reparations to those hardest hit could be the key to winning in 2020.
Read more →Sleeping Giant: When Public Workers Awake
It was the radical African-American intellectual, W.E.B. Du Bois, who famously called the mass disaffection and migration of southern slaves to Union battle lines in the Civil War a “general strike.”
Read more →Even blue-chip companies fail. Here’s how to save their workers, and towns, when they do The Washington Post
The new year has not been happy for former Sears employees. As the company fights for its life in bankruptcy court, laid-off employees of the 126-year-old retailer recently saw their severance pay stopped by the court at the same time that it approved $25 million in bonuses for the company’s executives.
Read more →What’s up with wages? Nothing, and that’s a problem (not a puzzle)
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.
Read more →Martin J. Bennett, “50 Years Ago: King, Memphis, and the Poor People’s Campaign,” Beyond Chron, May 31, 2018
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.
Read more →Eladio Bobadilla, “Creating a humanitarian crisis — while ignoring U.S. history,” Herald Sun, June 18, 2017
In an effort to “send a message” to potential asylum seekers from Mexico and Central America, the Trump administration and the Jeff Sessions-led Justice Department have created a humanitarian crisis on the border.
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MLK: To the Promised Land
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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MLK’s ’68 struggle for economic justice still marching on
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.
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