The Academy Awards have long served as a platform for activists to voice their discontent to an audience of millions — even if the Academy’s board hasn’t always felt positively about such stunts. Ironically, however, according to a March 1 Hyperallergic article by Rooney Elmi, the awards have nefarious origins: They were apparently created by…
Harvard University dining workers are celebrating a victory after a strike that gained them a $35,000 minimum yearly salary and stable health-care costs in their new contract. And Jewish students on campus are, by and large, celebrating with them after taking a prominent role at the forefront of the push to support their demands. The…
Warehouse workers at the massive Hasidic-owned photo and electronics store B&H Photo Video are demanding union representation, while alleging unsafe working conditions and unfair hours at the store’s two Brooklyn warehouses. Organizers filed a petition October 13 with the National Labor Relations Board for roughly 200 workers at B&H warehouses in the Bushwick section of…
T’ruah rabbis and farmworker activists protest at a Wendy’s in Naples, Florida, calling on the fast-food giant to join the Fair Food Program. Photograph by Coalition of Imokalee Workers. Who picks the food you eat? How are they treated? How much are they paid? These are just a few of the critical questions that we…
There are many icons of American labor: the Haymarket martyrs, Cesar Chavez, Joe Hill. But often overlooked are a cartoon pair who taught us a lot about resisting the wage system: Beavis and Butthead. In an episode titled “On Strike,” America’s favorite chuckleheads get inspired by the ongoing baseball strike to start their own work…
Israel’s Jewish Home party, for those still trying to follow these things, is a new body that reunites the main elements of the old National Religious Party (NRP, Hebrew Mafdal), which represented the Modern Orthodox / Religious Zionist constituency in the Knesset for a half-century. The NRP was a supremely pragmatic, almost Chicago-style organization that…
On April 24, just outside of Bangladesh’s capital city, one of the worst industrial disasters in history killed over one thousand workers and injured scores more in the dubious service of making cheap clothing for consumers like you and me. Around the same time, about 8,000 miles away in Brooklyn, my wife and I were…
The AFL-CIO posts the following question on it Web site: “The sustained war on workers from the right has left unions trying to prevent rights from being weakened rather than setting the agenda. Where are the opportunities to play some offense?” The answers are all over the lot; no coherent agenda is evident. But that…
100% of profits support our journalism
