Elections in Brazil are underway. Far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro faces leftist Fernando Haddad of the Workers’ Party in the final round of the presidential election. Brian Kelly interviewed historian Sean Purdy for explanations and reflections on the right and left, austerity, and labor issues in Brazil.
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The attacks on labor these days take many forms. Some are straight-forward and brutally confrontational—the Janus ruling or the state legislation in Iowa and Wisconsin and elsewhere that follow a similar script in their attack on labor’s position of strength in the public sector.
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Given that many working people are also poor, Labor Day is good time to talk about poverty in the United States. But in this election year, with so much with emphasis on jobs, we should look especially at the relationship between poverty and the changing landscape of work and economic insecurity.
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On May 11, more than two thirds of senators in Brazil voted to advance impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party (PT) for state accounting irregularities. The ex-Vice-President, Michel Temer, of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), has now assumed the Presidency temporarily for up to 180 days while the Senate investigates the charges.
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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.
Read more →Thomas Edsall’s recent New York Times op-ed on the failure of Democrats to engage as effectively as Republicans in state-level politics parenthetically surfaces a deeper historical debate that is ripe for revisiting: Why have postwar liberals been so ineffective in sustaining economic and political achievements?
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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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Readers of this blog are probably aware of what has been going on in the state of Wisconsin over the past couple of months. To recap: back in early February, Governor Scott Walker proposed a massive cut to the state education system of about $300 million, with the promise of reducing the state’s system of higher education to a “public authority.”
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