“Without These Workers, Everything Ceases to Exist”: How Coronavirus Is Coming for Your Produce
Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images Every year in mid-March, thousands of men from all over Mexico show up in downtown Monterrey, the country’s third-biggest city, with big, rolling suitcases and folders full of documents. They huddle in groups outside of cheap hotels, waiting on their appointments at the US consulate so they can get the stamp on their…
Home Care Workers Are Underpaid, Uninsured, and on the Front Lines of Fighting Coronavirus
ipopba/Getty Etelbina Hauser has a tough job. The 57-year-old immigrant from Honduras and grandmother of 12 makes minimum wage cleaning houses and taking care of a 93-year-old client with dementia in Seattle. But recently, when a nursing home offered her better pay and benefits caring for a dozen residents as a certified nursing assistant, Hauser…
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…