By Joe Maniscalco

Two minutes into any basic economics course and you learn labor exists as a cost at the bottom of the business ledger eating into the boss’s profits. A few pages into Peter Kellman’s slim but essential “Building Unions, Past, Present, and Future” history you understand that the laws of this land were written to favor the bosses in their endless quest to maximize those profits. The game is, in fact, rigged. And it has been from the very beginning.

By Steve Wishnia

More than 100 days after he was abducted from Maryland by ICE agents and shipped to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is still in jail. After nearly three months of using lies and stalling to evade court orders for his release, the Trump junta brought him back to face highly questionable federal charges of human trafficking.

By Joe Maniscalco

Walmart, the largest employer of women and people of color in the nation didn’t exactly have a stellar track record on racial equity before the family-controlled operation decided to roll back its Diversity, Equity, Inclusion programs in the wake of the Trump administration’s DEI vendetta.

By Steve Wishnia

“I’m somewhat surprised to see this hearing kept on the schedule,” Marc Freedman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce told an Occupational Safety and Health Administration panel June 16, the first day of two weeks of hearings on federal heat-safety rules proposed by the Biden administration last year. President Donald Trump suspended consideration of all pending regulations in an executive order Jan. 20.

By Joe Maniscalco

In 2018, my partner and I found ourselves in Paris, France on the eighth day of the burgeoning Yellow Vest Movement navigating the bonfires openly burning along Franklin Delano Roosevelt Avenue.

By Bob Hennelly

In our current dystopian circumstance, it's hard to sort out the signal from the static. The barrage of Trump assaults on science, human rights, public health, global humanitarian aid, as well as on democracy and the rule of law itself make it near impossible to get our collective equilibrium.

By Joe Maniscalco

Songs have always been integral to working class struggle and the broader labor movement overall. Think of your favorite anthems from Odetta, Phil Ochs, Woody Guthrie, or Bob Dylan and their amazing ability to instantly invoke the spirit of solidarity in anybody listening.

Work-Bites

Hello Work-Bites Builders! Today we kick off a new weekly cartoon series from Work-Bites friends and contributors Tim Sheard and Ryn Gargulinski. ‘That’s Outrageous!’ imagines an ongoing mock debate portraying two very different political ideologies…

WAR STORIES By Phil Cohen

I returned to New York in 1979 after a year of traveling across Asia, accompanied by woman named Faye. I found an apartment in Sunnyside, Queens, a working-class neighborhood bordering Long Island City, and resumed driving taxis. But my new friend was a country girl and terrified of the urban environment.

By Joe Maniscalco

As author Len Shindel says in the introduction to The Strike That Changed Maryland’s Wilderness County, he was “intent on getting some of the real dirt and gravel on the 1970 strike.”

By Joe Maniscalco

Patricia Hills, PhD and professor Emerita at Boston University’s Department of History of Art & Architecture, spent her entire academic and curatorial career helping to open up some of the top museums and cultural institutions in the nation to women, people of color, the poor, and other marginalized communities—everything the Trump administration is now attempting to roll back.

By Steve Wishnia

Since 2011, the annual Clara Lemlich awards have celebrated the lives of “women whose many decades of sustained activism have made real and lasting change in the world.”

“The idea of the evening is to give us all hope. We have to act. We can never give up,” Esther Cohen of LaborArts, a cofounder of the event, told Work-Bites.

War Stories By Phil Cohen

Part III – The Fine Art of Hustling

Every afternoon as I took my seat in the taxi, regardless of exhaustion levels or mood, my awareness shifted into overdrive. I felt like a fighter pilot about to go out on a mission. From the moment I hit the streets I was in a state of pure reaction time. If a cockroach tweaked its antenna in a garbage can a thousand yards away, I’d sense it. The street has zero tolerance for people who let their guard down. One has to constantly remain prepared for the unexpected and the only thing that can be trusted is instinct.

War Stories By Phil Cohen

Part II – Driving Upside Down

I was always on high alert when walking to the subway several hours past midnight. The majority of muggers initiate contact with victims by asking a polite question requiring an answer, leading to a discussion and building trust while casually approaching. A typical scenario goes like this:

By Joe Maniscalco

We saw a lot homemade signs at this past weekend’s mass anti-Trump rally in New York City all reflecting the working class anger and disgust many have about the current administration’s existential threat to the United States.