Unions are in trouble. Short of a giant meteor crashing on top of the nation’s union headquarters emblazoned with the words, “warning, you will soon be crushed by right-to-work laws,” few things could be clearer from the Supreme Court’s Harris v. Quinn ruling. Harris v. Quinn unites some of the most toxic trends in American labor tradition. Read More
Make the Road New York was formed in 2007, when the Brooklyn-based Make the Road by Walking and the Queens-based Latin American Integration Center merged, forming the largest nonunion immigrant membership organization in New York City. Today, with 12,600 dues-paying members, MRNY is a unique amalgam of worker center, legal clinic, citizenship school, mutual aid society, policy shop, protest factory and church. Read More
Bill Fletcher and I were talking about the analysis and the coverage of labor’s defeat in the Wisconsin recall effort. After we each read some back and forth in The Nation, we decided to jump into the fray to call out the central issue of the lack of radical political education inside today’s unions. Read More
The following was released on The Nation. No one wants to dwell on the faults of a successful campaign. Featuring mass celebrity arrests and dramatic images of thousands encircling the White House, last year’s struggle to halt the Keystone XL pipeline has come to be regarded as a model of progressive activism in the Obama era. Read More
The labor-environmental partnership, or, more colloquially, the blue-green alliance, has fallen into a state of disrepair. Even though pro-union environmentalists and a few unions worked together to fight the Keystone XL pipeline, the two camps ultimately remain divided, to their own detriment. In this episode of Nation Conversations, Jane McAlevey joins executive editor Betsy Reed to identify the failings of both sides and the types of solidarity that could help them combine forces. Read More