Monographs & Edited Collections (5,104 posts)

Pathbreaking research reveals how unions effected lasting change in some of the most far-reaching struggles of modern times. First, dockworkers in each city drew on longstanding radical traditions to promote racial equality. Second, they persevered when a new technology–container ships–sent a shockwave of layoffs through the industry. Finally, their commitment to black internationalism and leftist politics sparked transnational work stoppages to protest apartheid and authoritarianism.

The South Bronx has been the poorest congressional district in the U.S. for nearly forty years. While boroughs like Queens and Brooklyn have gentrified, the South Bronx is often still seen as a symbol of urban decay. But in fact, its residents—primarily people of color and including many immigrants—have made great progress in improving neighborhoods and creating a vibrant, diverse culture.

The United States has the world’s highest rate of incarceration, a form of punishment that ruins lives and makes a return to prison more likely. As awful as that truth is for individuals and their families, its social consequences—recycling offenders through an overwhelmed criminal justice system, ever-mounting costs, unequal treatment before the law, and a growing class of permanently criminalized citizens—are even more devastating.

Drawing on her own experiences with late-onset disability and its impact on her sex life, along with her expertise as a cultural critic, Jane Gallop explores how disability and aging work to undermine one’s sense of self.

Google and other internet firms usurp this essential freedom. “The typical complaint is that privacy is eroded, but that is misleading,” Zuboff writes. “In the larger societal pattern, privacy is not eroded but redistributed. […] Instead of people having the rights to decide how and what they will disclose, these rights are concentrated within the domain of surveillance capitalism.” The transfer of decision rights is also a transfer of autonomy and agency, from the citizen to the corporation.

Temp covers a century of economic history in which a dismal dynamic emerges. First, corporations grow immense and finance becomes central to their operation. Unions fight to harness them, and succeed. This creates stable, “good” jobs for the first time in history. Corporations then abandon immensity, self-immolate, and shrink. They slip labor’s collar. Free of unions, businesses embrace risk-taking, and hire temporary workers that don’t require benefits. Businesses fare the transition fine. Workers do not. Wages stagnate in the 1970s and continue to do so to this day.