Doug Henwood edits Left Business Observer and is the host of Behind the News. His latest book is My Turn.
Everyone is desperate for signs of life in the American working class, so the breathless talk of a “Striketober” a few months back made sense. But new Bureau of Labor Statistics data throws cold water on that idea: there was no strike upsurge.
Things may not be trending in the right direction for workers in the United States.
COVID-19 sparked the worst job losses since the Great Depression. The most recent numbers make clear that while American workers are still suffering immensely, they’re also feeling emboldened to reject bad jobs.
Ten years ago, I was ready to throw in the towel on this whole politics business, writes Doug Henwood — things were too bleak. Then Occupy Wall Street kicked off. Now, thank God, we’re living in the world Occupy created.
People are right to be disgusted by giant corporations. But the liberal “antitrust” response too often valorizes small-scale competition instead of solidarity and worker organization.
Labor strategist Jane McAlevey offers her take on why Amazon workers were defeated in their recent Bessemer, Alabama union drive.
For more than three centuries, something has been going horribly wrong at the top of our society, and we’re all suffering for it.
Whatever the size and shape of Joe Biden’s proposed infrastructure bill, you can be sure to hear corporate weeping and gnashing of teeth about how they can’t afford a tax hike. The truth: they’ve got the money — they just don’t want to share.
Strikes are the labor movement’s muscle, and when unions don’t strike, that muscle atrophies. Unfortunately, the latest data shows just how atrophied that muscle is. Simply put, workers aren’t striking.
The online pranksters behind the great GameStop bubble of 2021 are probably going to lose a lot of money. But they’ve done the world a service by reminding us of the utter uselessness of the stock market, an institution that serves no purpose besides making a small number of undeserving people rich.
US-style industrial farming has ravaged two of the world’s most fertile regions, California’s Central Valley and the Midwest’s corn belt. But we can build an agriculture system that delivers food in a sustainable way — and empowers farmworkers, too.
With an incarceration rate exceeding 700 people for every 100,000, Americans have built a prison monstrosity that has few parallels in history — destroying untold millions of lives and families in just a few decades. We need to study the economic origins of this mass incarceration system in order to dismantle it.
The latest economic numbers are dismal: GDP is projected to be down 33 percent from the first to second quarter of 2020. Even if we see some recovery soon, the long-term damage — people unemployed, businesses shuttered, confidence hammered — will be massive and lingering.
The United States is facing an unprecedented economic, political, and social breakdown. With the Right discredited and the Democrats out of ideas, now is the time for socialists to think big.
The only thing keeping workers in the United States from absolute destitution has been unemployment insurance and other social welfare benefits. If Congress doesn’t extend unemployment benefits at the end of the month, the economy will hurl off a cliff — and millions will be immiserated.
A new study finds that American jails — not just prisons — are a major hot spot for spreading coronavirus. The solution is simple: stop arresting so many people.
We could experience in months what took three or four years to unfold after the 1929 stock market crash. Things are going to be very bad unless we see some serious structural reforms.
Our economy is crashing hard and fast. But with a bold set of policies, like nationalizing the banks to fund a Green New Deal, we can save millions of workers from untold suffering — and transform the country in the process.
There’s lots of breathless talk these days about robots replacing all of our jobs. But if you look at the data, there’s little indication that’s actually going to happen.
Getting rid of Trump would be great, but Congress isn’t going to do it — we actually have to vote him out. And impeachment, a therapeutic ritual for MSNBC hosts and an act of score-settling by the national security state, isn’t helping.