Labor

In an article Peter Rachleff a professor of History at Macalester College in St. Paul reminds us of some statistics concerning the USA . Between 1979 and 2005, the mean after-tax income of the top 1 percent of income earners rose 176 percent while that of the lower half rose less than 10 percent....
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The SPGB case against socialist industrial unions : As the trade union movement stands to-day it is still craft and sectarian in outlook, still mainly pro-capitalist, even where the workers are organised on the basis of industry.The struggle on the economic held under capitalism has to be, and is, carried on by socialists and...
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Unemployment – Is it really the problem? Is unemployment really the problem? Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to play down the misery of the millions who have lost their jobs – or the millions more who are going to lose their jobs – as the world slides deeper into the next Great...
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Dirty gossip about the capitalist mode of production Guess who’s not getting that rose garden??? You would have to search long and hard to find someone who was better at sticking it to the working class than The Economist. It has perfected one of the most truly remarkable posturing acts in the annals of...
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  Erin McKean, a lexicographer writing in the Boston Globe, gives us a dictionary tour of today’s corporate capitalism and its private jargon that lights up a few interesting dark alleys. “The Word” of the day is “bonus” (as...
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The occupation of the Republic Window and Door factory in Chicago has ended. Certainly this has been an inspiring event. One hopes the sit-in will inspire even more inventive methods of fighting for working people. However, we must also take into account what was “won”. The workers received the monies owed them. They lost...
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Capitalism has a nasty habit of suddenly laying a ton of grief on unsuspecting members of the working class. A typical example is when the employees of Consumers Glass in Etobicoke, Ontario, were recently told the plant was going to be shut down just two weeks after they had negotiated a union contract. But...
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After months of labor unrest over pension reforms, thousands of workers in Greece walked off the job yesterday and marched through the streets of Athens in protest of current conservative government’s plans to privatize more industries. According to the report: Dock workers, hospital and civil aviation authority staff and workers at Greece’s biggest phone...
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In Bangladesh, workers are engaged in a protracted battle for the restoration of union rights, which were suspended more than a year ago when the government declared emergency rule. Interim authorities used that power earlier this year to file criminal cases against dozens of union members, including leaders of the Bangladesh Independent Garment Workers’...
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An Iranian bakery worker and co-founder of the Bakery Workers Trade Union, Mahmoud Salehi, was released from prison in early April after a year of incarceration. Imprisoned for breaches of “national security,” he had organized a rally on International Workers’ Day (May 1) in 2004. During his prison stay, protesters rallied outside the high-security...
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