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Our current general economic crisis at a time of very concentrated wealth and extreme income inequality has its own peculiar features, but in broad outline it is by no means new. Such crises have afflicted all levels of our government for centuries. During our nineteenth century’s Gilded Age, the e…

[...] the state has often paid for its bailout of large companies and financial institutions by imposing the costs on working- and middle-class people. Such a “bailout” is a politically legitimated transfer of wealth from the majority to a tiny minority based on the fallacious assumption that big c…

But it would be shortsighted to count on a new labor movement emerging within the confines of the existing unions. Throughout the country, new organizations are struggling to survive. Some of these are workers’ centers; others are unions formed, especially by the working poor, without early prospec…

During the two periods of twentieth-century labor upsurge, collective bargaining was achieved, initially, through worker disruption. This direct action was followed by legislation giving workers the opportunity to vote in state-supervised Labor Board elections for bargaining rights. But it was the …

In the 1970s and 1980s, labor’s forward march slowed and then halted. The ostensible cause was the fiscal crisis in state and local communities, which politicians, the mainstream media, and many economists ascribed to the disparity between rising public-sector labor costs and restricted tax revenue…