On May 15, 1905, a Maraka noble in modern-day Mali killed a slave who was part of a broader slave exodus that helped bring the end to official slavery in the French African colonies. This can serve as
On May 5, 1886, the Wisconsin National Guard opened fire on strikers in Milwaukee fighting for the 8-hour day, killing 7 workers. Coming a day after Haymarket and two days after the massacre of strike
Work in modern America really sucks. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is that the old idea of the 40-hour week–long a goal for workers in the past–has been eroded to the po
In 2014, the United Auto Workers attempted to organize the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Despite tacit neutrality from the company, Tennessee politicians and right-wing funders used open
Both parties are the same: The Labor Department weighed in Monday on a question whose answer could be worth billions of dollars to gig-economy companies, deciding that one company’s workers were con
The Stop and Shop strike is over and at least tentatively it looks like the workers won most of what they wanted. The devil is always in the details and I’m having trouble finding much about the
One of my very favorite museums in the country is the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. It does an absolutely wonderful job of taking you into a lost world of real hardship and horror. I can’t sa
The Stop and Shop strike continues, with the multi-billion dollar Belgian company who owns it apparently happy to lose millions a day in order to shred workers’ health care and force two-tier co