This past week, Murphy Institute Professor Stephanie Luce gave a talk at the James Connolly Forum on the fight for a living wage and the $15 minimum campaign. Couldn’t make it person? Catch the talk here:
Stephanie Luce is an Associate Professor of Labor Studies at the Murphy Institute.
By Joshua Freeman
Two organizations that come from different eras and different universes have joined forces to register voters and promote political involvement among New Yorkers. On Monday, the Amalgamated Bank and Rock the Vote announced a partnership to register voters for the November election. The bank will distribute voter registration forms in its twenty New York branches, sponsor an advertising campaign promoting registration, and join Rock the Vote in a national coalition to counter voter suppression.
Both organizations are in the process of reinventing themselves. Continue reading Votes, Banks, and Rock and Roll
By Joshua Freeman
This election season has seen an unusually open battle regarding political strategy among New York unionists and progressives. At stake is a crucial issue: how to balance the demands of building a movement that can fundamentally change a political and economic system that fails to serve most Americans against the existing political arrangements that benefit particular groups of workers. This was the key issue at the Working Families Party convention last May.
In 2010, the WFP backed Cuomo even as he attacked public sector unions and ran as a pro-business centrist. Once in office, he forced state workers to accept repugnant give-back contracts under the threat of mass layoffs, fought to lower taxes at the expense of services, and blocked various progressive initiatives.
This year, many WFP activists vowed not to go down the same road again. Continue reading Teachout’s Teach Out
By Joshua Freeman
In a Labor Day op-ed article in the NY Daily News, I argued that even as unions have suffered a series of setbacks and continue to slip in the percentage of workers they represent, labor issues are more prominent now than at any time in the recent past. What we are seeing might be called the re-emergence of “the labor question.” (New York is somewhat exceptional because, as the Murphy Institute’s Ruth Milkman and Stephanie Luce show in a forthcoming study reported in The New York Times, union membership in the city has been rising significantly of late.)
“The labor question” was once a common term, widely used in the early 20th century. On the simplest level, it asked how orderly relations could be maintained between employers and employees, preventing the outbursts of labor strife that had become common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Continue reading The Labor Question
Joshua Freeman is a professor of Labor History at The Murphy Institute. This article was originally published in The Nation.
The five-to-four Supreme Court decision in Harris v. Quinn is a blow to organized labor, a movement that in recent decades has suffered one blow after another, with victories few and far between. But it is not as devastating as many unionists feared. The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation hoped to use this case involving Illinois homecare aides to overturn the 1977 ruling in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision which found it constitutional to require public employees who choose not to join a union to pay an “agency fee” to cover the costs of representing them. The majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, took lots of potshots at Abood, but did not overturn it. Nonetheless, it ruled the agency fee illegal in this case, deeming the home aides involved not “full-fledged public employees” because under Illinois law they are jointly employed by the state and the individual clients they care for.
Continue reading Is Harris v. Quinn a Threat to Labor Peace?
