When we negotiate with power for better wages, we rarely fight for everyone. In fact, some of the first groups we negotiate out of the discussion are restaurant workers and tipped workers. Saru Jayaraman, President of One Fair Wage has been a fierce advocate for this particular group of workers, and she explains why in […]
Things are getting scary out there. We have Trump claiming he’ll be reinstated in August, his former National Security Advisor calling for a Myanmar-style military coup over the Memorial Day weekend, and GOP legislatures all over the country doing everything in their power to make sure people of color or anyone else who might vote […]
On this day in labor history, the year was 1921. That was the day one of the worst race riots in American history began in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In a frenzy of anti-black violence, a white mob destroyed virtually the entire black neighborhood of Greenwood. Over the course of two days, as many as 300, mostly […]
The argument is simple: large segments of the US working population once belonged to unions. In those unions, we found power, but we also found community. And while a lot of attention has been paid to the power we lost as union membership declined, we have spent much less time talking about how we lost […]
On this day in labor history, the year was 1863. That was the day the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry marched through the streets of Boston in a farewell parade and then boarded ships headed for Beaufort, South Carolina. Thousands lined the streets for the send off, including prominent abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips and […]
On Wednesday morning, a murderer walked into a public transit rail yard in San Jose, California and murdered eight co-workers with a gun, then turned a gun on himself. It’s an event that can happen anywhere, in almost any country on the planet, but it is also an event that happens so frequently in America […]