Centenaries and Memory

Today is the hundredth anniversary of the Triangle Shirt Factory fire in New York City, a signal event in the history of the American worker, and one that is drawing a remarkable degree of attention from a world so far from the one in which it occurred. This past December was my father’s hundredth birthday. […]

CineFile – Norma Rae

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to low wages, managerial mistreatment, and old age poverty. What kind of boss do you think the underhanded, contemptuous, and inflexible Scott Walker will be to work for? While Martin Ritt was not an exceptional film stylist, his origins in the 1930s Group Theater led to […]

The Political Lexicologist: Overreach THIS

What’s the difference between technical jargon and mind-numbing, unthinking cliché? Why, it’s that while I, on occasion, may resort to the former, you, of course, invariably use the latter. In the arid world of politics, however, we are richly blessed with language that is oppressively both and of which the citizenry is the object of […]

Political Action: 50-State Mobilization to Save the American Dream

This from Moveon.org.  If you care about labor rights in the U.S. If you know what workers’ lives were like before organized labor, before the widespread middle-class life so many Americans came to enjoy during the twentieth century – events in Wisconsin, now Illinois, Indiana and more, are the reactionary Right’s final assault on workers’ […]

The Republican War on Workers Heats Up

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Tuesday that if Republican efforts to cut federal spending resulted in the loss of government jobs, “so be it.” Ah, but you know – they’re government jobs, government workers, union workers, government employee union workers, barely workers, you know how they are, drawing salaries when I’m out of work, […]