New Labor Forum is a national labor journal from the Murphy Institute and the City University of New York. Published three times a year, New Labor Forum provides a place for labor and its allies to test and debate new ideas. Issues we explore include (but are not limited to): the global economy’s impact on work and labor; new union organizing and political strategies; labor’s new constituencies and their relationship to organized labor’s traditional institutions; internal union reform and new structural models for the labor movement; alternative economic and social policies; and the role of culture in a new, revitalized labor movement. Read the latest issue or subscribe to New Labor Forum.
The New Labor Forum has a monthly newsletter on current topics in labor, curated by the some of the most insightful scholars and activists in the labor world today. Check out some highlights from the latest edition below.
In his introduction to Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter, the poet Martin Espada writes: “I see the rebels marching, hands upraised before the riot squads, faces in bandannas against the tear gas, and I walk beside them unseen. I see the poets, who will write the songs of insurrection generations unborn will read or hear a century from now, words that make them wonder how we could have lived or died this way, how the descendants of slaves still fled and the descendants of slave-catchers still shot them, how we awoke every morning without the blood of the dead sweating from every pore.” Espada’s words hold special poignancy now, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death.
George Floyd died on a Minneapolis street, his neck pinioned beneath the knee of police officer Derek Chauvin. Like so many other police killings of people of color, the murder of George Floyd demands that we scrutinize the role of law enforcement unions in relation to racist and warrior-style policing. In the case of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, the union is standing by Officer Chauvin and his colleagues, who looked on for over eight minutes as Floyd pleaded “I can’t breathe.” Although Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey last year banned the warrior-style training that teaches the sort of chokehold that Officer Chauvin used to restrain Floyd, the Minneapolis Federation continues to champion the use of such potentially lethal maneuvers. The union leadership, in the person of union president Bob Kroll, has a long history of antagonism against advocates of reform and has called Black Lives Matter a “terrorist organization.” These facts force tough questions about the nature of police unionism. Four years ago, faculty and staff at the CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies, publisher of New Labor Forum, already understood the gravity of this matter and devoted a two-day conference to bringing Black Lives Matter activists into conversation with leaders and members of police unions. In this newsletter, we offer an interview with conference speaker Carmen Berkeley, then Director of the AFL-CIO’s Civil, Human and Women’s Rights Department. We also include reporting from Mother Jones by Inae Ho on the Minneapolis union’s endorsement of conditions that ultimately led to George Floyd’s death.
Table of Contents
Confronting the Tragedy: An Interview with Carmen Berkeley. Interview by Ed Ott of Carmen Berkeley, former AFL-CIO Director of the Civil, Human and Women’s Rights Department
Minneapolis Banned Warrior-Style Police Training. Its Police Union Kept Offering It Anyway / Inae Oh, Mother Jones
The New Labor Forum has a monthly newsletter on current topics in labor, curated by the some of the most insightful scholars and activists in the labor world today. Check out some highlights from the latest edition below.
The global video game industry – catering to 2.5 billion gamers across the world who annually purchase upwards of $152 billion in games – has become a new site of labor organizing. The mostly young people who carry out the game design, programming, aesthetics, and quality assurance for games like Halo, Assassin’s Creed, and World of Warcraft, are finding reasons aplenty to unite as workers. Having largely grown up without an experience of unions, their passion for video games has run headlong into the 50 to 70-hour work weeks (known as “crunch”) that are common in the industry prior to a game’s release. Often these hours go unpaid or underpaid. And once the games are released, mass layoffs are common, and those who have contributed to the game’s development often find their names missing from the credit rolls.
In the current issue of New Labor Forum, Jamie Woodcock describes nascent worker organizing in the U.K. that arose outside of traditional union channels, largely on-line, foregrounding demands for worker control more so than for wage increases. Woodcock assesses the use of social media as an organizing tool and conjectures on the lessons the UK campaign offers to game workers in the U.S. and elsewhere. Recent self-organizing among game workers in the U.S. has, in fact, spurred the formation in early January of the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees launched by the Communication Workers of America. We offer an article from the L.A. Times that describes that budding effort. And we conclude with a talk by Jamie Woodcock on his book, Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle.
Table of Contents
Organizing in the Game Industry: The Story of Game Workers Unite U.K. / Jamie Woodcock, New Labor Forum
Major union launches campaign to organize video game and tech workers / Sam Dean, Los Angeles Times
Video: Jamie Woodcock presents Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle / Jamie Woodcock
The New Labor Forum has a monthly newsletter on current topics in labor, curated by the some of the most insightful scholars and activists in the labor world today. Check out some highlights from the latest edition below.
With this newsletter we offer advance reading of a feature article from the January 2020 issue of New Labor Forum. In it, Harold Meyerson examines the forces that have made California, once a bastion of conservatism, now the bluest state in the union. Cautioning against the facile formulation that demography is destiny, Meyerson suggests demographic trends don’t adequately explain California’s leftward shift. He tells the story of the emergence of a savvy and determined Latinx-labor coalition that transformed the political landscape, enabling the passage of a slew of recent groundbreaking legislation protecting workers, immigrants, and the environment. We provide a summary of that legislation here . We also include an article fromCity & State New York , discussing the New York State legislature’s yet unsuccessful efforts to keep pace with west coast counterparts by enabling the reclassification of whole groups of gig workers as employees.
Finally, if one person can be credited as the architect of California’s political transformation, Meyerson suggests it was the former Miguel Contreras, son of immigrant farmworkers from Mexico, who in 1996 became the executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. Back in 2002, at the apex of his leadership, New Labor Forum ran an interview by Kent Wong and Ruth Milkman with Miguel Contreras, in which he describes the disarray within organized labor he confronted early on at the fed, and the strategic organizing undertaken that would later lead to a series of remarkable victories for labor, immigrant, and working-class communities. We include that interview here.
Table of Contents
The “Blue-ing” of California / Harold Meyerson, New Labor Forum
Here Are The 2019 Bills California Has Passed So Far — Now It’s Up To Newsom / CalMatters, LAList
Is there any hope for gig workers this session? / Annie McDonough, City & State New York
Interview with Miguel Contreras / Ruth Milkman and Kent Wong, New Labor Forum
On December 3rd, SLU held an evening forum entitled “Beyond Resistance: A Progressive Immigration Agenda for 2020,” as part of its ongoing #Election2020 program series.
Distinguished Professor Ruth Milkman moderated a panel discussion featuring Maribel Hernández Rivera, District Director for Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute at NYU Law; and SLU Distinguished Lecturer Deepak Bhargava, who was the longtime President and Executive Director of the Center for Community Change and Community Change Action. The forum was co-sponsored by the New York Immigration Coalition.
Hernández Rivera discussed the potential of migrants’ stories to shift public dialogue and educate more Americans about the crises immigrants face and the contributions they make. Chishti provided insider critiques of recent immigration policy failures and a balanced outlook about the specific proposals a new Democratic administration should prioritize. Bhargava spoke about the intersections between U.S. foreign policy and immigration policy, as well as how racism shapes public opinion and policy-making.
Missed the event or want to review the conversation? Check out the video above.
The New Labor Forum has a monthly newsletter on current topics in labor, curated by the some of the most insightful scholars and activists in the labor world today. Check out some highlights from the latest edition below.
Surveillance capitalism has opened up a whole new era in capital accumulation, the developments of which New Labor Forum continues to examine. Relying on a process of primitive accumulation which has always been characteristic of capitalism, surveillance capitalism extends capital’s reach beyond nature and human labor into the interior, intimate life of human beings, by tracking, manipulating, and trading in human behavior. In the current issue of the journal, Evan Malmgren surveys this twenty-first century data merchandising and behavioral manipulation and assesses the burgeoning efforts by individuals and organizations to tame, if not exactly overturn, this new brand of capitalism.
And, as advance reading for newsletter subscribers, we also offer Max Fraser’s January 2020 column “Organized Money: What is Corporate America Thinking?”, which tracks recent dramatic increases in political spending, including a marked surge in contributions to Republicans, by the pioneers of surveillance capitalism. Big Tech lobbying and campaign contributions , especially by the “Big Four” — Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple — have catapulted to fend off a spate of government inquiries, record-setting fines, and mounting worker protest , including petitions, walk-outs, and union organizing drives . Fraser suggests that a primary concern of Big Tech has been to prevent the proliferation of California-esque legislation — epitomized by the state’s Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 and its new law requiring gig-economy workers to be regarded as employees rather than independent contractors. And as the battle between surveillance capitalism and its growing legion of detractors rages on, we’ll continue to cover it.
Table of Contents
Resisting “Big Other”: What Will It Take to Defeat Surveillance Capitalism? by Evan Malmgren / New Labor Forum
Big Trouble for Big Tech by Max Fraser / New Labor Forum
How Workers Are Fighting Back Against Big Tech by Rick Paulas / Vice
Google Fires 4 Workers Active in Labor Organizing by Kate Conger and Daisuke Wakabayashi / The New York Times
On Friday, November 15th, SLU hosted a Labor Forum on the future of labor rights. 135 people attended to hear how the labor movement can fight for workers’ rights and protections while the Trump administration continues to attempt to roll them back.
Featured speakers included:
Randi Weingarten — President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
Steven Greenhouse — Veteran New York Times labor journalist and author of the new book, Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor.
Vincent Alvarez – President of NYC Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO
Although union density is near an all-time low, labor activism has surged in many sectors. From adjunct faculty to video game developers, digital media workers, platform app drivers, and public school teachers, labor movement activism is growing in a number of key sectors. This is happening as many full-time jobs with benefits are disappearing, consumer/student debt is skyrocketing, the “gig economy” is expanding, and economic insecurity is increasing for American workers and families. Housing and child care costs – which heavily impact workers’ income, wealth, and health – have also become more burdensome for many families. Under President Trump, a number of worker rights and protections have been weakened or denied, including:
• No movement toward federal minimum wage increase
• Weak overtime protections for salaried workers
• Allowing employers to self-report wage violations and escape penalties • Siding with employers against rights of gay and transgender workers
• (Mis)classifying Uber drivers and others as independent contractors, denying them basic rights
• Continuing ‘Right-to-Work’ efforts kickstarted by Supreme Court’s Janus decision
• Restricting workers’ right to organize at franchised businesses like McDonald’s
• De-funding and weakening OSHA
What should be Democrats’ top policy priorities to strengthen all workers’ rights? What are the most significant gaps and weaknesses in protections for worker organizing and economic rights today? ‘Right-to-work’ laws? Legal constraints against strikes and other worker actions? Minimum wage? The growing numbers of workers who fall outside the protections of the NLRA? Lack of livable safety net benefits for displaced and underemployed workers? Lack of protections for flex/gig workers? What new policies would best promote stronger worker protections and greater economic justice?
A conversation about workers, communities and social justice
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New Labor Forum is a national labor journal from the Murphy Institute and the City University of New York. Published three times a year, New Labor Forum provides a place for labor and its allies to test and debate new ideas. Issues we explore include (but are not limited to): the global economy’s impact on work and labor; new union organizing and political strategies; labor’s new constituencies and their relationship to organized labor’s traditional institutions; internal union reform and new structural models for the labor movement; alternative economic and social policies; and the role of culture in a new, revitalized labor movement. Read the latest issue or subscribe to New Labor Forum.
