labor
Posts (26)
Auto Workers Strike Plants at All Three of the Big 3
Tick, tock. At midnight the clock ran out, and auto workers massed on picket lines. The first-ever simultaneous strike at the Big 3 automakers—General Motors, Ford, Stellantis—started September 15 with 13,000 workers walking out of three assembly plants in Michigan, Ohio, and Missouri. There are 146,000 Auto Workers (UAW) members at the Big 3. The […]
Tags: labor, strike, UAW
Beyond Recovery: The Global Green New Deal and Public Ownership of Energy
In the most recent Working Paper of Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, the group explores ideas about public ownership and the role of a Global Green New Deal from the left as a legitimate alternative to the current neoliberal approach to energy transition.
Tags: climate justice, energy, energy democracy, green new deal, labor, trade unions, tued, unoins
Tesla’s Power Games: Unionizing and (Just) Transition in the Automotive Industry in Germany and the US
Introducing a publication written by Dr. Johannes Schulten and Jörn Boewe, supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung’s Geneva Office, which asserts the global transformation of the automotive industry. The English translation of the publication will be released soon. The automotive industry plays a pivotal role in the intersection of climate change, industrial policy and labor […]
Tags: germany, labor, tesla, USA
The Right Wing is Organizing in Canada. Can The Left Learn to Stop Them?
While the Canadian left remains static, the rising right has reinvented and morphed itself to appeal to diverse groups of people across the country.
Tags: canada, labor, Left organizing, strategies against the far right, unions
Sara Nelson | Keynote Speech
On October 29, 2022, Sara Nelson, International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO, gave the keynote address at “Step by Step, Feeling the Ground: Transatlantic Left Dialogue and Internationalism in Our Time.”
Tags: labor, solidarity
Amazon Workers Strike Back
How organizers and activists are seeking to turn the tide at the e-commerce giant The victory for the Amazon Labour Union (ALU) in the union election at the JFK8 fulfilment centre in New York represents a major success for the labour union movement within Amazon’s global network. For the first time, workers in Amazon’s most […]
Tags: Amazon Labor Union, labor, organizing, unions, workers
A Populist Progressive Path Forward on Trade Policy
The answer lies outside Washington. Our strategy must balance our principled policy agenda against the practicalities of politics in the mid-term election.
Tags: aflcio, labor, trade, Trade Policy
We Need a Jobs Guarantee
Building upon last year’s series Labor and the Jobs Guarantee put on by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung NYC, along with The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), DSA Ecosocialists, and the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, RLS-NYC is proud to release We Need a Jobs Guarantee. We Need a Jobs Guarantee explains what […]
Tags: federal, jobs guarantee, labor
Beyond Disruption: How Reclaimed Utilities Can Help Cities Meet Their Climate Goals
In TUED Working Paper 14, Beyond Disruption: How Reclaimed Utilities Can Help Cities Meet Their Climate Goals, Sean Sweeney and John Treat showcase how the energy transition that was promised has yet to come to fruition. They argue specifically the arguments around cities leading the transition have not been fully accurate and provide a sober analysis of where we stand.
Tags: cities, decarbonization, energy democracy, labor, trade unions, utilities
If Not Us, Who?: Global Workers Against Authoritarianism, Fascism and Dictatorships
If Not Us, Who?, a new edited volume sponsored by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, features contributions from some 30 authors on the new class-conscious feminism and labour struggles during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as stories from France, the US, Germany, Japan, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, the Philippines, Russia, Argentina, Spain, Indonesia, South Korea, former East Germany, Tunisia, Egypt, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Tags: labor
Unpacking the COVID-19 Labor Shortage
It appears that that after more than a year of economic turmoil and job losses, some workers are finding that employers are competing to recruit them with better compensation and job quality, and prospective employees have a slightly more capacity to hold out for better jobs. The labor market’s improved offerings might seem to conservatives like an undeserved reward for the jobless, but they actually reflect a small advantage for labor.
Tags: covid-19, labor, labor shortage, us
On the Precipice: A Progressive Agenda in the Biden Era
On the eve of the inauguration of Joe Biden, we at Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung – New York commissioned a series of reports on key political issues. We wanted to hear how experts feel the Biden administration might address these issues and better understand how receptive the incoming administration is to a progressive agenda, and know on what issues progressives will have to continue to put pressure. You can read the complete series below.
Tags: biden, china, covid-19, education, housing, labor, military spending, mmt, nuclear, progressive, russia, un
Class Struggle and Solidarity: What Labor Still Needs Under Biden
The incoming Biden administration projects it’s desire to be the most labor-friendly presidential administration ever, but without organized public pressure, they quickly will be mired in merely reversing problems created in the last four years without any plan to comprehensively address the structural losses of the last 40 years. This kind of piecemeal approach will not be enough to advance the change working people need. A better future for workers and labor is possible, but only if we demand it.
Tags: biden, labor
Overcoming Fear, Taking Back Power: Trinational Workers Toolkit
After a nine month process that began with the Overcoming Fear: Creating a Trinational Workers Toolkit gathering at UE 506 in Erie, Pennsylvania on November 14 and 15, 2019, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, along with all of our partners who dedicated time and resources to this project, are proud to release our completed Trinational Workers Toolkit. This toolkit is geared toward […]
Tags: labor, toolkit
Digital Organizing Isn’t as Straight Forward as it Seems
Digital organizing has become the hot new thing in unionization campaigns. Digital mobilization and engagement technologies have become essential to winning. However, while some unions have won remarkable gains utilizing these technologies, other unions have lagged behind.
Tags: canada, labor, organizing, unions
Why U.S. Teachers Are on Strike: And How They’re Winning
In this new piece for RLS–NYC, labor columnist Kim Kelly presents us with a recap of the recent upsurge of protests that are sweeping the American education system in many states, gaining victories for workers and support from communities. According to the author, 2019 it’s already proving to be an incredibly important year for organized labor in the US. By fighting so hard for themselves and for future generations, America’s teachers have shown the rest of the labor movement—and the world—that there is still great power in a union, and we are always stronger together.
Tags: education, labor, strike, teachers
Report from the Trinational Labor Gathering
RLS-NYC and the UCLA Labor Center co-hosted the “Trinational Labor Gathering,” bringing together left labor activists from Mexico, Canada, and the US to share information and strategies and craft transnational solidarity campaigns.
Tags: labor, trinational
Domestic Workers Organizing
The Convention 189 Campaign as a Mobilization Model Precarity is on the rise. Low-wage service jobs have seen a significant surge in the last years, and domestic work has become one of the largest sectors of employment in the global economy. And these household workers have been almost entirely excluded from the labor protections afforded […]
Tags: domestic work, labor, organizing
The Long Struggle of the Amazon Employees
The conflict at Amazon has become a “laboratory of resistance,” where important lessons have been learned, not only with respect to resistance against low wages and precarious employment in Germany, but also for workers who are fighting back at Amazon’s other sites in Europe.
Tags: amazon, labor
Building Worker-to-Worker Solidarity
At our annual tri-national labor gathering, progressive unions and other labor organizations from the United States, Canada, and Mexico come together to discuss and collaborate on international solidarity campaigns. Co-hosted with the UCLA Downtown Labor Center and its Institute for Transnational Social Change, these tri-national gatherings create an important space for the necessary task of […]
Tags: labor, worker solidarity
Your Liberation is Linked to Ours: International Labor Solidarity Campaigns
At our annual tri-national labor gathering, progressive unions and other labor organizations from the United States, Canada, and Mexico come together to discuss and collaborate on international solidarity campaigns. Held each December in Los Angeles and co-hosted with the UCLA Downtown Labor Center and its Institute for Transnational Social Change, these tri-national gatherings create an […]
Tags: labor, solidarity, worker solidarity
Roll Back Low Wages: Nine Stories of New Labor Organizing in the United States
Precarity. If we were to select one word to best describe the most important current trend in the economy of the United States, “precarity” would be a leading candidate. It is now widely accepted that America’s middle class is shrinking. Recent polls suggest that possibilities for merit-based advancement are at their lowest point ever. A […]
Tags: labor, unions
Resist, Reclaim, Restructure: Unions and the Struggle for Energy Democracy
When it comes to the global energy system, trade unions recognize that business as usual is not sustainable. Union members are already feeling the impacts of climate change, whether as first responders to climate catastrophes or as members of the most impacted communities. There is a growing community of trade unionists working for energy democracy. […]
Tags: energy democracy, labor
Death of a Yuppie Dream: The Rise and Fall of the Professional-Managerial Class
Saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of debt, unemployed or working part-time for not much more than minimum wage: the struggling recent college graduate has—thanks to Occupy Wall Street—become a new iconic figure on the American cultural landscape. To many it seems that an implicit promise has been broken: work hard, get an education and you will […]
Tags: class analysis, labor, pmc Background Notes for Death of a Yuppie Dream
By John Ehrenreich und Barbara Ehrenreich The Absorption of the Liberal Professions into Corporation-Like Enterprises During the last fifty years, rapidly accelerating in the last twenty or so, corporations (or other large institutions, such as “mega” law firms, hospitals, and universities—organized along more-or-less corporate lines and sharing corporation priorities) have come to be the employers […]
Tags: labor, pmc
The State of Unions in the US
Ever since the election of Ronald Reagan to the U.S. presidency and the following launch of the neoliberal period in the early 1980s, trade unions in the United States have suffered a steady decline. Today, barely one in ten workers carries a union card, compared to more than one in three in 1953. At the […]
Tags: labor, labor movement, union, us labor