#working-class-access

#working-class-access

The Jewish Labour Bund was a revolutionary political party born in 1897 in the Czarist Empire that was secular, that was socialist, that was defiantly Jewish.

"The trauma of that day continues to affect every aspect of my life," José Pablo Henriquez Sagastume, a 20-year-old Allston Car Wash worker who was detained that day, said in a statement. "We were just doing our jobs when armed officers surrounded us and treated us like criminals. No one cared who we were. No one asked anything before grabbing me."

"There are very real economic forces that are limiting the options for non-college-educated men in the United States. Some of what we're seeing is simply rational responses to a system that's pricing them out."

Under a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement program, federal authorities had detained Serigne, a Senegalese asylum seeker and the brother of dishwasher Abdoul Mbengue. 'I didn't know what to do at first, but we had this community, and I told them this news,' Mbengue says through a coworker who is translating his French.

This is really about trying to put power in the hands of people. There's 70% of workers who want a union, and 10% have them. If it were a company, they would figure out how to get the product into the hands of the 70% who wanted it.

"Today's vote ignores the well-documented harmful consequences of wage hikes by economists. Not only would this proposal slash up to 86,000 jobs, it would also worsen inflation for Pennsylvania workers and residents."

Within the workplace, the content and conditions of work are largely controlled by employers who often have an interest in degrading the quality of work, both to increase productivity and to increase their control over employees in the workplace. Outside the workplace, employers have both an incentive and the power to undermine measures that would improve the quality of work through the political process.

The labor of this kind of organizing was invisible and deeply exhausting. In a precarious workplace, where a so-called 'performance review' could amount to job loss, organizing meant building a bridge while standing on it.

The language of blue-collar fathers isn't spoken-it's lived. It's written in grease-stained paychecks, in Saturday mornings spent under the sink, in showing up to work sick because the mortgage doesn't care if you have the flu. After forty years in the trades and raising my own kids, I finally decoded what my father and countless men like him were really communicating through their actions.

Losing staff could be detrimental to the projects we worked on, and there was a growing dissatisfaction with how meetings were run. These mostly one-sided discussions left the quieter half of us feeling pushed aside, like our thoughts didn't matter much. If things stayed this way, I worried the good people on our team would start quitting one by one.

Growing up outside Manchester, I remember watching my mum count out exact change at the supermarket checkout, keeping a running total in her head as she shopped. Meanwhile, my university roommate would just toss things in his trolley without a second thought. That's when it hit me: Financial security isn't just about having money. It's about the mental space that money creates.

Work, in the words of Karl Marx, is a "means of life" in two senses. It is, first of all, an instrument for human life. It is the activity by which we reproduce ourselves from day to day, from year to year, from generation to generation. But work also forms, so to speak, much of the matter of human life, at least for most people in any society with which we are familiar.

Last week, hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants faced an uncertain future as the Trump administration fought in federal court to revoke their legal status and deport them. But despite these threats, the largely immigrant union workers at a JBS beef plant in Greeley, Colorado, many of them recent arrivals from Haiti, still voted on Wednesday by an overwhelming margin to strike over poor working conditions in what could become the first sanctioned walkout at a major meatpacking plant in decades.

Brown was sitting in a Toledo coffee shop, having just finished a roundtable discussion about rising health-care costs. A small group of Ohioans had expressed all manner of concerns about how they would afford their medical bills, co-pays, and prescriptions. This was the kind of event that Brown used to do a lot of before he departed the Senate after losing reelection in 2024.

The reporting landed on the same day that a group of Senate Democrats launched an investigation into Chavez-De-Remer's policy moves at the Labor Department, accusing her agency of showing "disregard for workers' lives" by "rolling back protections that keep workers safe and hobbling the agency that is tasked with overseeing worker safety."

The strike is a response to the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minnesota. In the days since, calls for a nationwide shutdown have spread rapidly across social media, shared by activists, nonprofits, and everyday people urging a halt to economic activity. Celebrities including Pedro Pascal, Edward Norton, and Jamie Lee Curtis have amplified the message to their followers.

In places where inclusion is part of the infrastructure of their economy-supply chains, procurement processes, capital access, or business ownership-people thrive. Inclusive economies create more resilience by expanding the base of potential business owners who can build, own, innovate, and hire. They allow more opportunities for homeownership and investing in the longevity of communities. As our economy becomes increasingly stratified and volatile, we need as much resiliency as we can get.