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Alex N. Press is a staff writer at Jacobin. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Vox, the Nation, and n+1, among other places.
A 60,000-person strike that would have shut down the film and television industry nationwide was averted this weekend when IATSE reached a tentative agreement with the studios. But contract ratification by the union’s members is far from guaranteed.
Across the US, a more militant mood among workers is beginning to make itself felt. An uptick in private-sector strikes and record numbers of workers quitting their jobs are just two signs that the pandemic has changed workers’ willingness to accept a bad deal.
Around 420 workers at the Kentucky-based Heaven Hill Distillery have been on strike for a month. They say the company is pushing to radically change scheduling and remove a cap on health insurance premiums.
More than 1,400 workers at Kellogg’s cereal plants across the US are on strike. Fed up with 12- to 16-hour days, seven days a week, with mandatory overtime, they were pushed over the edge by the company’s drive to downgrade wages and benefits for new workers.
IATSE members voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike today. In the television and film industry, where long hours and unpredictable schedules are the norm, crew members are being pushed to their breaking point.
When I first heard about Occupy Wall Street, I thought it was goofy, even absurd. Maybe it was. But I joined its encampments anyway. Like countless others, it was the first time radical politics ever reached me.
Capitalism has created a world full of bad and brutal jobs, from meatpackers to drone operators. Capitalists created these jobs — only organized workers can get rid of them.
Over the past decade, sportswriter Dave Zirin has had a front-row seat to the upheavals sweeping professional sports. From Colin Kaepernick to the Milwaukee Bucks’ strike for Jacob Blake, athletes aren’t shutting up and playing anymore.
At the University of Pittsburgh, roughly 3,500 educators are voting on a union. If they win, it will be the largest new union in the United States this year.
A warehouse safety bill proposed in the California legislature could force Amazon to be transparent about its productivity quotas — and threaten the aura of invincibility and omnipotence the company uses to intimidate and silence workers.
At Amazon, big organizing campaigns by established unions — like the one in Bessemer, Alabama, this year — are only the most visible face of labor organizing. The other is Amazonians United, a militant shop-floor group with a presence around the country.
Uber and Lyft said that California’s Proposition 22 would help their drivers. We now have proof they were lying.
Amazon is installing high-tech cameras inside supplier-owned delivery vehicles. Workers say the cameras are a shocking invasion of privacy as well as a safety hazard.
Fed up with what they say are impossible schedules, disrespect, and demands for concessions, Chicago Nabisco workers joined the nationwide strike that already involves Nabisco workers from Portland, Oregon to Richmond, Virginia. We talked to one of them.
A month after Frito-Lay workers walked off the job, workers who make Nabisco products like Oreos and Triscuits are on strike in Colorado, Oregon, and Virginia. They say management is trying to make already bone-grinding schedules even more intolerable.
The gig companies, fresh from their Prop 22 victory in California, are seeking to repeat their success in Massachusetts, pushing a ballot measure that would strip app-based drivers of existing labor protections like the minimum wage.
Punishingly long hours have always been the norm in the film industry. But now, a year and a half into the pandemic, the workers behind television shows and movies are fed up and starting to organize.
Amazon was already gargantuan before the pandemic. Its rapid growth since then has made it one of the most powerful institutions in the country’s history — shaping our physical as much as mental landscapes, and putting more and more of our daily lives under its control.
A federal official has recommended that the results of the union election at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama warehouse be thrown out and a second election be held, due to the company’s illegal anti-union tactics. It’s a step forward for the essential task of organizing one of the world’s most powerful companies
Ever since Amazon arrived in Poland in 2014, the country has been a laboratory for the company’s strategy of pitting workers of different nations against one another. We spoke with Polish shop-floor activists who are organizing Amazon workers for a global fightback.