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New Labor Forum Highlights: June 12th, 2017

The New Labor Forum has launched a bi-weekly 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 installment of Highlights from New Labor Forum, we draw your attention to a roundup of notable books and films you might have missed. We’re grateful to NLF contributor Matt Witt for his excellent curatorial skills, which are a regular feature of his “Out of the Mainstream” for the print journal! Among the books Witt points to in his forthcoming inventory is Look, an arresting book of poetry by Solmaz Sharif. Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Sharif is a former participant in Poetry for the People, and arts/activism program founded at UC Berkeley by the late, great poet June Jordan. The sampling of her work included here, offers precise and unforgettable depictions of the dread brought about by our wars on terror.

Table of Contents

  1. Out of the Mainstream: Books and Films You May Have Missed by Matt Witt / New Labor Forum, September 2017 issue
  2. 2 Poems by Solmaz Sharif
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New Labor Forum Highlights: May 30th, 2017

The New Labor Forum has launched a bi-weekly 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.

Ah, summer! Time for conferencing, summit-ing and gathering for organizers, activists, and left-leaning academics. New Labor Forum has done the hard work of curating some of the more important upcoming events on our radar that we think you’ll be interested in. While attending a conference is usually a major expense, increasingly the organizers are using livestreamed video and social media to make remote, online participation a reality. All of the events listed below are also agenda-setting opportunities for their constituencies, so it’s worth following to see what  new thinking is emerging.

We’re not ranking by order of importance, and would love to see the events we missed that you think ought to be mentioned – on our website. We’ll be updating the link to this list with your suggestions. Get ready to learn more about Left Forum, The People’s Summit, Allied Media Conference, the Labor and Working-Class History Conference, the Working-Class Studies Association Annual Conference, the National Urban League Conference, Netroots Nation, and the Personal Democracy Forum.

Table of Contents

  1. Conferences on the Left
  2. Labor Studies Conferences
  3. Broad Political & Constituency Conferences
  4. Immigration Policy in the Trump Era (VIDEO) with Muzaffar Chishti, Director of the Migration Policy Institute

Photo via National Nurses United/Twitter

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New Labor Forum Highlights: April 17th, 2017

The New Labor Forum has launched a bi-weekly 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 the escalation of US involvement in the Syrian battlefield AND the introduction of our biggest bomb ever to the caves of Afghanistan, it’s urgent that we ask what happened to the anti-war movement. Lyle Jeremy Rubin, an Afghanistan War Vet, has written an appeal for New Labor Forum, calling for a reinvigorated veterans peace movement. While there has always been veteran organizing, under a Trump presidency, this constituency holds particular meaning. Veterans are an incredibly diverse constituency, but one that is rooted in the working class, and distant from the ‘coastal elites’ that the right wing finds so easy to demonize.

We look at the veterans who joined the Women’s March in Washington for personal insights, and at a book review of Tom Hayden’s last and posthumous book, about the Vietnam anti-war movement. Finally, to close our vet-specific content, we offer a link to the Veterans Organizing Institute, a little known training program in organizing for veterans.

The broader peace movement gets an in-depth look from Daniel May at The Nation. This article sums up ‘where we are’ just before the recent escalation. And Thomas Gallagher, in another NLF original, makes it clear precisely how Bernie Sanders plays a distinctive role  in US politics when it comes to war and peace.

Table of Contents

  1. Appeal for a Reinvigorated Veterans Movement by Lyle Jeremy Rubin
  2. Veterans Talk About Why They Joined The Women’s March In DC by Adam Linehan / Task and Purpose
  3. The significance of Bernie Sanders’s opposition to Donald Trump’s Syria bombing by Thomas Gallagher
  4. How to Revive the Peace Movement in the Trump Era by Daniel May / The Nation
  5. The Veterans Organizing Institute

Photo by Shawn Musgrave via flickr (CC)

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New Labor Forum Highlights: Mar. 20th, 2017

The New Labor Forum has launched a bi-weekly 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 this issue, we’re looking at the explosion of what is being called ‘the resistance.’ The vast proliferation of organizing in the face of President Trump raises important questions Should partisans inside the Democratic Party wage a fight between its left and it’s center, or combine forces? Does the proliferation of new efforts represent genuinely innovative projects, or does it mask a great deal of overlap and wheel reinvention? Should the main target of organizing be Trump and the Republicans, or broader, systemic obstacles that include casino capitalism? Finally, what does it mean that the largest, most powerful progressive institutions  – such as organized labor – don’t seem to be at the forefront of this resistance?

Today’s issue includes a piece written for the newsletter by Tom Gallagher on the strategic options confronting the left within the Democratic Party; an article by Micah Uetricht  soon to appear in the May issue of New Labor Forum assessing the Sander’s inspired Our Revolution as well as various snapshots of what this resistance is looking like in the current moment, including the breaking news that a major local of the Service Employees International Union as well as a multitude of workers centers plan to participate in a May Day strike.

Table of Contents

  1. The Democratic Party Left After the Ellison DNC Campaign: Unite or Fight? By Thomas Gallagher
  2. The World Turned Upside Down: ‘Our Revolution,’ Trump Triumphant, and the Remaking of the Democratic Party by Micah Uetricht
  3. List of New Resistance Initiatives in 2017
  4. GroundGame listing of protests
  5. SEIU Local Joins May 1 General Strike by (BuzzFeed) Cora Lewis
  6. Indivisible Eldorado Hills Townhall meeting

Photo by Ted Eytan via flickr (CC-SA)

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New Labor Forum Highlights: Mar. 6th, 2017

The New Labor Forum has launched a bi-weekly 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.

This year, International Women’s Day (March 8) is being celebrated in the U.S. at a higher pitch than usual. The election of Donald Trump has led to an upsurge in organizing and activism. In the last few months, we’ve witnessed  the massive Women’s Marches in cities all over the country and, indeed, the world; a February 16th Day Without Immigrants and a less successful call for another general strike on February 17th; and the current call for a global women’s strike on International Women’s Day.

This newsletter opens with an informative and lucid overview by Diane Elson of  the current global state of gender inequality, as well as  policy recommendations to remedy the crisis.  Elison’s article is provided here as a coming attraction to the May 2017 issue of New Labor Forum. The issues she raises form part of the animating spirit of the call for a  Women’s Strike on March 8., organized  by a coalition of  women working closely with the venerable Global Women’s Strike, an international organization that has existed since 1972. Here we also offer the link to the  promotional video for the strike.

General strikes, or days of action that are meant to resemble a strike, are gaining in currency. An example of recent experimentation with a general strike was the February 16th ‘Day Without Immigrants’, described here by Dan DiMaggio and Sonia Singh in Labor Notes.  NLF editorial board member Nelson Lichtenstein addresses the meaningful difference between ‘weekend protest’ vs. ‘weekday strike action’ and why it matters, in No More Saturday Marches, published this week in Jacobin. We also include Francine Prose’s essay in The Guardian, offering a full-throated argument for  the general strike as a tactic. And we close with Alexandria Neason’s meditation in the Village Voice – Is America Ready for a General Strike?

Table of Contents

  1. Recognize, Reduce, Redistribute Unpaid Care Work: How to Close the Gender Gap by Diane Elson
  2. Women of America: we’re going on strike.
  3. Video: International Women’s Strike US – Promotional Video
  4. Tens of Thousands Strike on Day without Immigrants by Dan DiMaggio, Sonia Singh
  5. No More Saturday Marches by NLF editorial board member Nelson Lichtenstein
  6. Forget protest. Trump’s actions warrant a general national strike by Francine Prose
  7. Is America Ready for a General Strike? by Alexandria Neason

Photo by Garry Knight via flickr (CC-BY)

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New Labor Forum Highlights: Jan. 23rd, 2017

The New Labor Forum has launched a bi-weekly 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 numbers from the rallies this past weekend are astounding: 600 events in dozens of countries with a global turnout in the millions. What sparked the uprising that surprised us all?.

In addition to widespread antipathy toward the Donald, another driving force is certainly an outrage over the state of our democracy. Trump won the Electoral College, but lost the popular vote by 3 million votes. And in so many other ways — from the erosion of voting rights to the massive increase in political spending by the super rich — we are witnessing the shredding of fundamental democratic principles. This crisis neither began, nor will end with Trump, Rob Goodman warns in an especially useful article in Politico. We include that here as a way to provide some insight into what is happening and how we might respond. Aso included is the video of an illuminating talk at the Murphy Institute by Saqib Bhatti of the ReFund Project, in which he explores shifts in the economy that mirror the shifts in our political culture. And by way of surveying the proliferation of organizational responses to the crises we face, New Labor Forum has compiled a list of many of the new, social media-fueled efforts launched since the election. And among the new-ish organizations formed pe-election is LittleSis, a winking name referencing Big Brother, committed to  uncovering the conflicts of interest to watch for as corporate power continues to exert undue influence.

Table of Contents

  1. What Trump Taught Us About Democracy by Rob Goodman
  2. Debt, Wall Street, and Public Sector Unions, presentation by Saqib Bhatti
  3. The New Wave of Organizing on Social Media
  4. LittleSis – the Database of Hidden Relationships Among the Powerful

Photo by Ted Eytan via flickr (CC-BY-SA)