A much-overlooked part of the rise of the Communist Party as the leading Left organization in the mid twentieth century is that it produced a robust network of schools for workers. An overview of these schools conveys the effort to
Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend by Robert W. ChernyRobert W. Cherny’s new book, Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend (University of Illinois Press, 2023) is a monumental achievement. More than thirty-five years in the making, it is exhaustively researched,
In fall 1936, the Chicago Public Library initiated the Chicago Foreign-Language Press Survey, with funding from the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA), one of the New Deal programs designed to provide unemployment relief and support engagement in cultural production. Over
Chad Pearson’s review follows a series of recent posts from Labor Online that reflect on and feature the work of contributors to Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education: A Labor History (2024) edited by Eric Fure-Slocum and Claire
Every spring, over thirty women union activists are accepted to attend the Regina V. Polk Women’s Labor Leadership Conference, or The Polk School as it is fondly referred to. The Polk School is a program of the University of Illinois’
On Wednesday, May 15, 79% of 48,000 graduate student workers at the University of California who cast their ballots voted to authorize a strike. Their demands include UC divestment from weapons manufacturers and contractors who profit from the Israeli war
In my book, What Work Is, I assert that work has an enormous contradictory impact on the workers and society they build. Anthropologist Herbert Applebaum draws on a biological metaphor to centralize the importance of work to the individual and
Charisse Burden-Stelly recently published Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States. The book offers a radical and interdisciplinary analysis of the ways anti-Black racial oppression infused the U.S. government’s anti-communist repressions over the long mid-20th
New York State and California have both created commissions to study the possibility of reparations to African Americans for the legacy of slavery and post-Civil War segregation and racism. The California commission has already recommended direct payments of over a
Introduction: An injury to one is an injury to all. Motto of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. ILWU demonstrators at the Vancouver, Washington, 2013–2014 lockout in the Northwest grain industry. Credit: Dawn DesBrisay. In the past four decades, the