Help Us Stay Paywall-Free

We rely on readers to keep our website open to all. Help sustain a public space for collective reasoning and imagination—make a tax-deductible donation today.

Tag: Labor

Rachel Fraser

The post-work movement reckons with reproductive labor.

Paul Engler, Mark Engler, Janice Fine

Janice Fine explains how “co-enforcement”—a bold new model for upholding labor law—is linking the state to social movements.

Brishen Rogers

Workers will benefit from technology when they control how it’s used.

Karen Levy

Both regulators and employers have embraced new technologies for on-the-job monitoring, turning a blind eye to unjust working conditions.

Eli Friedman

Protests in China are shining a light not only on the country’s draconian population management but restrictions on workers everywhere.

Deborah Chasman, Robin D. G. Kelley

Robin D. G. Kelley on the midterm elections.

Mike King

A posthumous collection tracks Noel Ignatiev’s commitment to class struggle, abolishing whiteness, and finding a vision of freedom in the minds and actions of working people.

Lynne Segal

Remembrances of the late author have focused on her best-selling Nickel and Dimed with only rare acknowledgement of the major roles she played in women’s liberation and U.S. socialism.

Lynne Segal

Dependence is a fact of all our lives; freedom lies in our capacity to care for others.

Jodi Dean, Charisse Burden-Stelly

And what today’s organizers can learn from them.

Breanne Fahs

Our well-being depends on a better understanding of how the logic of labor has twisted our relationship with pleasure.

Heather Berg

Sex workers are labor's vanguard. The left ignores them at its peril.

Mie Inouye

How a new class of “salts”—radicals who take jobs to help unionization—is boosting the organizing efforts of long-term workers.

Harmony Goldberg, Erica Smiley

Recent union drives point the way to more effective action against corporate power.

Robin D. G. Kelley
While W. E. B. Du Bois praised an expanding penitentiary system, T. Thomas Fortune called for investment in education and a multiracial, working-class movement.
Emily Callaci

Selma James’s work with the Wages for Housework movement shows that we ignore the labor of care at our own peril.

Brian Callaci
Monopoly power has certainly harmed workers, but the solution should be a wholesale rethinking of economic policy—not an embrace of perfectly competitive markets.
Sophie Lewis

Recent works depict the agonies and rage of being a low-wage housekeeper or nanny. But all fail to identify capitalism itself as the culprit.

Madeline Lane-McKinley

Intrinsic to what we hate about work is that we can’t imagine life outside of it.

Max Jordan Nguemeni Tiako

If we want to address vaccine hesitancy in the health care system, we must treat its lowest paid workers better.

Anna Romina Guevarra

The pandemic increased demand and possibilities for automating care, but doing so may deliver racist stereotypes and unemployment for women of color.

Nichola Lowe
To support the work of the future, we must promote workers’ skills as crucial to technological progress.
Shellyne Rodriguez, Billie Anania

Artist-activist Shellyne Rodriguez speaks with Billie Anania about museum labor practices and how Strike MoMA imagines a future of art for the people.

Charmaine Chua

Two timely new books unmask the colossal shipping industry behind global trade, whose monstrous pursuit of profit has long wreaked havoc on laborers and the seas they sail through.

Ruth Milkman
Non-college-educated U.S.-born workers have every reason to be enraged by declining wages and living standards, but more restrictive immigration policies won’t solve these problems.
Nantina Vgontzas
Unions are just one element of a broader push to transform the company. Coalitions forged during the pandemic point the way forward—with a radical vision of worker and community control.
Mike Konczal
Labor activists once understood time to be a checking mechanism on market activity. In our own era of uncontrolled working hours, this is a vision of freedom worth recapturing.
Jessa Crispin

The pandemic has foregrounded women's exploitation in the home and challenged feminism to once again go beyond middle-class concerns. 

Daniel Carpenter
U.S. democracy and the U.S. postal service share a long, entangled history. An attack against one signals an attack against the other.
Nathan Wilmers, Paul Osterman, Barbara Dyer, Thomas A. Kochan, Emilio J. Castilla, Erin L. Kelly

Workers deserve substantive policy reforms that point the way to a better future, especially in this year of unprecedented crisis.

Todd Wolfson, Astra Taylor

Astra Taylor talks with Rutgers faculty union president Todd Wolfson about organizing academic communities in the age of COVID-19.

Samuel Clowes Huneke

In 1961 Frank Kameny became the first person to ask the Supreme Court to protect the employment rights of homosexuals. The fact that the Court finally has—sixty years later—points to both the successes and agonies of a legalistic approach to activism.

Julie Kohler
Neoliberalism rests on the myth that “good” families can provide for their own without public support.
Jeffrey Kucik, Rajan Menon
The deep, growing divisions in U.S. society have an outsize effect in determining who suffers from this pandemic—as well as how the government responds.
Anne L. Alstott
Society relies on the unpaid, invisible work of parents—mostly mothers—to care for children and to buffer kids from trauma and stress. Supporting that work during COVID-19 requires direct cash support to families.
Mark Nowak
When Celes Tisdale led poetry workshops at Attica State Prison, soon after the 1971 uprising, some of the prisoners were still recovering from gunshots. Their writings demonstrates the power of poetry to help oppressed people heal from trauma and organize their political thinking.
Manoj Dias-Abey
A new geoeconomic order is creating opportunities for organizing along supply chains.
Amy Kapczynski, Gregg Gonsalves
The right response to COVID-19 is to rebuild our economy from the ground up, putting people to work in a massive jobs program to secure the public health of all.
Eleni Schirmer
As Wisconsinites are forced to vote during a pandemic, it’s worth recalling the 2011 Wisconsin Uprising, and the valuable lessons that can be gleaned from labor organizing in the face of disaster.
Brishen Rogers
COVID-19 has exposed the fragility of our labor markets just as much as the fragility of our public health and welfare systems. As we take the economy out of its induced coma, we should ask what kinds of jobs we want and need.
Lenore Palladino
We face an economic crisis not least because the rules of corporate governance slight workers and preclude economic resiliency. We must reform them now.
Felicia Wong, Mike Konczal
Our long-term goal must go well beyond the Senate bill to build a more resilient economy.
Arindrajit Dube
We must act now to support families and businesses. Greatly expanding U.S. unemployment insurance is an obvious way to go—in part because the system is already up and running.

Just in time for the holidays, get any three print issues of Boston Review for just $35 – that’s 40% off the cover price!

Before December 9, mix and match any three issues for one low price using code 3FOR35.

Just in time for the holidays, get any three print issues of Boston Review for just $35 – that’s 40% off the cover price!

Before December 9, mix and match any three issues for one low price using code 3FOR35.

"An indispensable pillar of the public sphere."

That’s what sociologist Alondra Nelson says of Boston Review. Independent and nonprofit, we believe in the power of collective reasoning and imagination to create a more just world.

That’s why there are no paywalls on our website, but we can’t do it without the support of our readers. Please make a tax-deductible donation to help us create a more inclusive and egalitarian public sphere—open to everyone, regardless of ability to pay.