Labor

A New Age of Worker Empowerment

How new approaches to worker organizing are finding success.

Solidarity in Silicon Valley

Tech companies have seen waves of worker protest, but they are still far from democratic. The remedy is to build and exert real forms of worker power inside the workplace.

Amazon’s Empire

Our best writers take on the retail giant.

Sex Is Not the Problem with Sex Work

Under capitalism, you don’t have to love your job to want to keep it.

The Last Man to Know Everything

The Marxist-environmental historian Mike Davis has produced a rich corpus critical of capitalism.

What Would Frances Perkins Do?

FDR’s labor secretary had a vision for forward-looking labor and employment policy.

Think Different

Apple—now worth a trillion dollars—redistributes more wealth upward than any country or corporation on the planet.

How Slavery Inspired Modern Business Management

By “dangling the carrot” to improve worker productivity, businesses are taking a page from slavery’s playbook.

The Democrats’ Yawning Silence on Trade

The party has not articulated an alternative trade agenda that supports all the world’s workers in a global economy.

Public Benefit, Incorporated

Three simple changes to corporate law could radically remake our economy.

Marxism Without Progress

When philosophy tries to reclaim Marx, the duty to interpret comes before the duty to change. 

Don’t Let Them Eat Cake

The Supreme Court’s Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling continues a terrible trend of valuing businesses more than employees and customers.

The Limits of Antitrust Enforcement

The problem of employer power runs much deeper than monopsony.

Elon Musk’s Fall from Grace

The public has paid for Musk’s vision. So why is the green economy still not here?

Who Is Watching Wall Street?

Stock buybacks are on the rise, and they are shortchanging workers and undermining our economy like never before.

Will Robots Set Us Free?

The philosopher Herbert Marcuse saw machines as our greatest hope for real liberty. But in Trump’s America, automation feels more totalitarian than ever. 

Globalization Survived Populism Once Before—and It Can Again

Forget retraining and compensation programs. History offers a better way forward. 

The Gig Economy’s Great Delusion

Platforms have sold themselves as substitutes for welfare, but they have actually served as substitutes for traditional work—with the state forced to pick up the slack.

#ThemToo

To fight sexual harassment in the workplace, we must learn from the history of women in the labor movement.

Writing While Socialist

Vijay Prashad on writing, struggle, and hope in difficult times.

It’s The Gap, Stupid

Three books draw a disturbing picture of America as a system of compounding inequality driven by a hereditary meritocracy of professional elites.

A New Social Contract for Work

This Labor Day, it is not enough to speak out against Trump's many injustices. We must also begin laying the foundations for working together in the post-Trump era, whenever that arrives.

What the Minimum Wage Debate Gets Wrong

Critics of raising the minimum wage claim that it decreases employment, but they are missing the larger point.

Will Amazon Take Over the World?

What the rise of megaplatforms means for the rest of us.

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