Category: Labor / Economics
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US Unions Must Look Beyond Themselves to Save Themselves
Argues that unions in the US–and by implications elsewhere–need to reject business unionism for social justice unionism by using their power in workplace to not only back workers there, but to back working people in work places AND in the community, at the local, national and/or global levels. Either we work for good of all,…
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Hickel: Climate, Energy and Natural Resources
Relying on capital to deliver an energy transition is a dangerously bad strategy. The only way to deal with this crisis is with public planning. On the one hand, we need massive public investment in renewable energy, public transit and other decarbonization strategies. And this should not just be about derisking private capital – it…
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The Union Makes Us Strong: Understanding Trade Unionism in a Global Context
Discusses the need for labor activists to go beyond “lowest common denominator” union organizing.
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Stop the Ukraine War: Refuse to Handle Military Cargo
The ILWU has always criticized NATO’s war moves. Since the end of World War II we’ve opposed U.S. wars and coups in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Serbia (former Yugoslavia), Cuba (Bay of Pigs Invasion), Chile (coup), El Salvador and Nicaragua. On May Day 2008, ILWU shutdown all West Coast ports to oppose the “imperialist wars in…
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Bolivia Presents Revolutionary Socialist Program To Transform World
Bolivia’s President Luis Arce used his platform at the United Nationss to propose a revolutionary 14-point socialist program to transform the world. “Today we find ourselves facing a wide-ranging, systemic capitalist crisis that increasingly endangers the life of humanity and the planet,” he warned. “We should not only reflect on the economic, social, food, climate, energy,…
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Chile’s Social Movements and Organized Labor Are Central to the Fight to Transform Society
On June 20, Gabriel Boric’s recently inaugurated reform government announced the closing of a copper smelter in the Punchuncaví-Quintero industrial corridor. The plant, which had polluted the air and riverways of the neighboring towns for decades, was frequently responsible for public health crises in the region. The most recent occurred in May when pollutants from…
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Evo Morales: UK Role in Coup That Ousted Him
When the coup was looking inevitable, Morales had gone underground. Days after Morales and Linera arrived in El Trópico, Mexico’s left-wing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador sent a plane to rescue them, flying them out of Chimoré airport again. Obrador later said that the Bolivian armed forces targeted the aircraft with an RPG rocket moments after it took off.…
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The CIO Was One of the Most Successful Anti-Racism Movements in U.S. History
In the 1930s, a new type of union, an “industrial” union that welcomed all workers in a single workplace emerged as the cutting edge of working-class struggle. Previously, unions and employers both had a long history of racism and support for white supremacy. Certain jobs were reserved for whites, and Black workers were kept out of factories and…
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Seventy Five Years Later, Toll Of Taft-Hartley Weighs Heavily On Labor
The Taft-Hartley Act was the centerpiece of big business’s counterattack against a labor and people’s movement that had, over the previous decade, won major improvements for working people on factory floors and in the halls of Congress. From 1936 through World War II, the new industrial unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) —…
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Labor Activists Launch New Organization to Challenge AFL-CIO Foreign Policy
Announces a new initiative, LEPAIO (Labor Education Project on AFL-CIO International Operations), to challenge the AFL-CIO’s foreign policy.
