Posts tagged Wade Rathke
A History of Everything Leftist Unionism: The Old Left and the Reds
March 10, 2025 // American labor radicalism has come a long way from Soviet agents in the Congress of Industrial Organizations through the UAW-funded Students for a Democratic Society to today’s SEIU purple-shirted demonstrators and red-shirted UAW anti-anti-Hamasniks. As Big Labor has declined, what independence the labor movement had from the progressive Left has diminished to the point where, with rare divergences, it effectively has ceased to exist. The causes of the Long Decline are many, and the causes of Big Labor’s leftism are also many, ranging from financial incentive structures of union officials to the structure of collective bargaining. Today, organized labor is a full member of the Everything Leftist coalition, not just in economic issues and labor organizing but also in social and foreign policy.
Dollar store workers are organizing for a better workplace. Just don’t call it a union.
August 18, 2022 // But among the high profits and skyrocketing stock prices, workers are protesting. Around 100 protesters gathered outside a Dollar General shareholder meeting in Goodlettsville, Tennessee last May. Most of them came with the organization Step Up Louisiana. Jackson has been training as an organizer with the group, specifically to work with dollar store workers. Yet the group is careful to clarify that it’s not a union. It has been organizing workers and supporting unions, but doesn’t see unionizing as the best way to improve dollar stores. “We’re not a union,” Jackson said. “I don’t know if we ever will be but I do know we have momentum right now.” Kenya Slaughter, Cedric de Leon, University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Labor Center Mary Anne Trasciatti, Hofstra University, Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama and WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR