In the UC Santa Cruz Wildcat Strike, Class War Meets the California Housing Crisis
Mairav Zonszein “This is a marathon, not a sprint,” Sarah Mason, a graduate student in sociology at the University of California Santa Cruz, tells a crowd of several hundred students, wrapping up the fourth day of an unprecedented wildcat strike that has drawn threats of mass dismissal and captured the attention of UC campuses across…
Kickstarter Was Supposed to Be About Conscious Capitalism. So Why Did It Oppose a Union Drive?
Maurizio Gambarini/AP Yancey Strickler, the co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter, has been in a bit of a bind. His book, This Could Be Our Future, is a “manifesto” for “a more generous world.” It is an argument for—and even a partial guide to—a new, conscious capitalism. But he can’t avoid the other major development…
“You Can’t Afford to Get Sick”: Why Workers at the Country’s Largest Health Contractor Want a Union
HRAUN/Getty On a snowy day this past December, Logan Stinemetz was driving to his job at a call center in Lawrence, Kansas, where he helps people enroll in health insurance, when he hit black ice and spun into a concrete barrier. The accident left Stinemetz in debilitating pain, made worse by the arthritis and degenerative…
Major Labor Strikes Surged in 2019
Thousands of teachers and their supporters march through downtown Raleigh, North Carolina during a one-day strike in May 2019.Ethan Hyman/ZUMA Last May, for the second year in a row, thousands of North Carolina public school teachers marched to the state Capitol in red t-shirts to demand better funding for public schools and Medicaid. In part…
Jail Inmates Worked for a $16 Billion Company Without Pay. Now They Want Their Wages.
The Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, CaliforniaSalwan Georges/Washington Post/Getty The last time Bert Davis was booked into Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, California, he was assigned to Housing Unit 31, the pod for inmate workers, and promptly sent to work in the facility’s industrial kitchen. This was routine for Davis, who had cycled in and…
Heroes of the 2010s: Kshama Sawant, the Socialist Who Beat Amazon
Mother Jones illustration; Jason Redmond/Getty The staff of Mother Jones is rounding up the decade’s heroes and monsters. Find them all here. In 2013, an actual Trotskyist named Kshama Sawant was elected to the Seattle City Council. A Trotskyist is a kind of communist—not in the sense that Republicans call Democrats communists, but in the sense that communists…