All Articles

Part 1: The Name of the Game Is Class Struggle

It’s no secret that, over the last 40 years, income inequality has soared in the United States.

George Floyd was murdered by police after a retail worker reported that he had paid with an allegedly counterfeit $20 bill, and we know this was no isolated incident. So at the bookstore where I work, many of us have been thinking about the times when police have been called to our workplace.

If you search for films about labor, one makes every list: Norma Rae. This most iconic of union movies was a critical and box office smash when it came out in 1979, the same year Labor Notes published its first issue.

I started in the labor movement in the mid-90s, when the fall in union density from 23 percent of the workforce in 1980 to 15 percent in 1994 had created a crisis at the top.

On day two of their five-day strike, Alameda Health System workers in California's East Bay won a landmark victory.