Working In These Times--links to articles

Hello my friends,

Happy almost Labor Day. The state of things for working people is—I’m not going to sugar coat this—bad. Hey, it is statistically likely that next year will be somewhat better, probably! We must all find strength in solidarity now. The best way to do that? By making sure you have signed up for the In These Times 44th anniversary celebration, “Labor Power in a Time of Crisis,” happening online September 12.

See you there. And now the news.

This Week in Working

Why Every Job in the Renewable Energy Industry Must Be a Union Job
By Mindy Isser

In order to get unions on board with green jobs, the environmental movement will have to fight for those jobs to be union. And unions will have to loosen their grip on fossil fuels in an effort to embrace renewables.

A Brief History of the U.S. Government’s Targeting of Left-Wing Immigrants
By Shaun Richman

A new book by lawyer and historian Julia Rose Kraut, Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States, comprehensively lays out America’s long history of using the denial—and even the threatened removal—of citizenship in order to restrict some forms of political action.

In California, a “Labor Slate” Aims to Redefine the Relationship Between Unions and Politics
By Hamilton Nolan

A new grassroots group of union activists has recruited a slate of candidates to run for local positions in the Bay Area—all backing a labor-centric platform. They hope to be a model for a larger move into union-friendly political power not beholden to one of the two main parties.

The Working People Podcast

Cops—Labor: Which Side Are You On? (w/ Kim Kelly, Halimat Alawode, & Julia Wallace): Working People closes out Season Three with a critical discussion about why cops have no place in the labor movement and about the rank-and-file push from groups like No Cop Unions (AFL-CIO) and Drop the Cops (SEIU) to get them out. Listen here.

The Big Issue: Labor Day

For Labor Day, everyone who writes about Labor in America is legally required to publish a long and ponderous essay with a title like “What Labor Must Do to Turn Things Around.” I will skip that this year (you can just reread all the ones from past years, they never seem to change very much) and just say:

If you work at a non-union workplace, unionize it. (If you need help getting in touch with a union organizer, try here, or ask me.)

If you have a union, get involved with it. If your union sucks, take it over. If your union is weak, make it hardcore. A union is as good as you make it.

If you cannot unionize, go talk to your coworkers next week—not just about what is bad at work, but how you can work together to deal with the boss to fix it. You do the work. Without you all, there is no business.

And don’t do any work on Labor Day, if you can help it.

Labor News This Week


A funny thing that happened this week was that Amazon got exposed for spying on its employees online and also for putting up a job ad seeking a spy to keep tabs on internal worker organizing and then immediately had to be like “Uh, that’s canceled, we don’t do that any more.” Yeah right. Someone please take Jeff Bezos’s money away.


A new study from Rutgers about wage theft finds that “For each percentage point increase in a state’s unemployment rate, there was almost a full percentage point increase in the probability that a worker would experience a minimum wage violation.”


The union representing the workers of the ACLU in Kansas says that the ACLU has suspended the staff’s unit chair in an act of retaliation against the union. Unbelievable.


Also, employees at Surly Brewing Co. in Minneapolis say that the company has laid off more than 100 of them in an act of retaliation for unionizing.


If your employer is considering layoffs, grab them by their lapels and MAKE SURE THEY HAVE CONSIDERED WORK SHARE ARRANGEMENTS FIRST.


As companies force their employees to stand in line for various security checks before and after their work shifts, we are still, incredibly, fighting over the question: Do companies need to pay their employees for all of the time they make them do stuff? (Yes.)


Unionized workers are more likely to be able to have safe workplaces. Unionize your workplace.


The union-backed government airline bailout, that has kept airline workers on the payroll since the pandemic began, is set to expire at the end of this month, and airline unions say they need it to be extended, or the industry will face an unemployment catastrophe. This is the program that the government should have given to every industry. And still can!


The podcast studio Parcast has unionized with the Writers Guild of America East, meaning the WGAE now has organized three Spotify-owned podcast companies. Yeah baby … the future.


New York City’s teachers union gestured at a credible strike threat over the city’s inadequate and unsafe plans to reopen schools, and the city has delayed reopening by weeks. Strikes work.

Final Thought

“Bullying creates a moral drama in which the manner of the victim’s reaction to an act of aggression can be used as retrospective justification for the original act of aggression itself.” —David Graeber, RIP