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Labor History: A Key to Making Bad Jobs Better
By Rebecca Lurie This summer, the Pinkerton Foundation released a new paper called “Make Bad Jobs Better: Forging a “Better Jobs” Strategy,” by Steven L. Dawson. Dawson argues that the tightening labor market and improving economy offer new opportunities for organizers, educators and workers to bargain harder and “make bad jobs better.” Here, Rebecca Lurie, Program…
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Dial-an-Organizer: Using Storytelling and Emotion to Build Movements
By Kressent Pottenger Imagine: you call a hotline to complain about how you were fired for being pregnant or harassed by your manager. On the other end, an operator gives you advice on organizing and labor law. It sounds unlikely today, but in the 1970s, a group of women clerical workers, frustrated with their treatment,…
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Undesigning the Redline
In recent years, “gentrification” has infiltrated the everyday speech of urban residents struggling to stay in their communities in the face of rising rents. But gentrification is only one piece of a much longer history of displacement and policy-produced poverty in American cities. This history runs from slavery through Jim Crow, redlining, racial covenants, blockbusting, urban renewal, capital…
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Brexit & the Working Class
By Leah Feder Brits, Europeans and the world at large have experienced a rude awakening over the past 24 hours. The people of the United Kingdom have, against most predictions, voted to leave the European Union — inviting an onslaught of as-yet unknown consequences. Lots of factors conspired to bring the country to this unexpected place: xenophobia, falling wages,…
