In Chicago this coming weekend, 2,500 rank-and-file activists, from the U.S. and abroad, will be meeting under the banner of Labor Notes to celebrate the revival of union militancy, including recent strike victories like the West Virginia teachers’ walk-out.

This conference—nineteenth of its sort since 1981—will be the largest gathering ever hosted by the now Brooklyn-based labor education project. Labor Notes staff train shop stewards and local officers, promote cross-union networks, and publish books and newsletters about union democracy and reform.

German metalworkers’ union IG Metall made international headlines last month after a twenty-four-hour “warning strike” compelled employers to sign a deal with the union giving its members the right to a twenty-eight-hour workweek.

State-level reforms for universal health care are laudable; they are not single payer.

Two states with a long history of state-based healthcare reform efforts, California and New York, are hard at work organizing for state bills labeled as single payer healthcare plans. Other states are moving in that direction too. This raises questions by single payer advocates: Can states create single payer healthcare systems? Does state-level work help or hinder our goal of National Improved Medicare for All (NIMA)?

During his State of the Union address, President Donald Trump exclaimed that the “war on American Energy” had ended and that “we are now an exporter of energy to the world.”

Michelle Chen points to studies showing that worker cooperatives are more productive than privately owned firms.

Settled agriculture, cities, nation-states, information technology and every other facet of the modern world have unfolded within a long era of climatic good fortune. Those days are gone. Sea levels are rising; climate is becoming less stable; average temperatures are increasing. Civilization emerged in a geological era known as the Holocene. Some have called our new climate era the Anthropocene. Future intelligent life will know we were here because some humans have filled the fossil record with such marvels as radiation from atomic bombs, plastics from the oil industry and chicken bones.

Here are two idioms that have no applicability to the United States Congress: “Once bitten, twice shy;” “The third time’s a charm.”

2017 was my fourth season in a row working in the Cannabis industry in California, and it might well turn out to be my last, considering how rapidly the industry is changing, especially since the 2016 passage of Proposition 64 for adult recreational use.

My employment has always been hourly, arranged with handshake contracts, and “at will” for all parties. Never been a boss and haven’t wanted to be. I’d already had my days of running-the-whole-show when I was farmer in Oregon growing vegetables, seeds and herbs (but never pot) for the ten seasons up ’til 2014. Since then, I’ve been perfectly content as a helper for somebody else‘s headaches.

As 2017 winds down, it’s important to remember that this year marks the 200^th anniversary for the call for a 40-hr workweek for laboring people.  The 8-hour day movement involves not only changes in the workweek, but the struggle over class power.  Turning points in this history of the workweek outline the reconfiguration of modern capitalism: