Blogging Against Disablism Day always represents a fantastic opportunity to express solidarity across two important causes: disability rights and labour rights. The two have more in common than many people seem to think, and this marks a perfect opportunity to talk about their intersections. The labour rights movement includes disabled people, and the disability rights …
Tag Archives: labour
Know Your Food System: Indigenous Farmworkers in California
The food movement has been slow to recognise the fact that worker rights and working conditions should be a key part of any discussion about the ethics of food. Reforms to the food system need to incorporate workers and their welfare, not just better farming practices, more humane treatment of animals, and other measures focusing …
Where Are the Protections for US Domestic Workers?
Nannies. Housekeepers. Cooks. Care providers. The faces who slip quietly through the houses of the wealthy and some members of the middle class, making their lives run more smoothly, distancing them from the dirty realities of cleaning toilets, peeling potatoes, holding back the hair of a sick child, turning a paralysed family member to prevent …
Retail Workers Need Rights Too
Retail work is often not considered very taxing, nor is it regarded as an area in which employee rights are an urgent issue. Such workers, after all, aren’t toiling in the hot sun of the Central Valley, lugging heavy cleaning kits through hotels, or performing domestic work in the homes of abusive employers. Yet, this …
A Part-Time World
While we talk about jobs as part of the economic recovery, one thing that often goes undiscussed is the deeper specifics of those jobs and what they actually mean for workers. There’s an ‘any job is a good job’ implication that goes along with how jobs are talked about, and that ignores the fact that …
Capitalism Wins Again: Hating Strikers, Not Their Employers
This has been a year of increased visibility of strikes in the media, by both public and private sector workers in a range of industries. From teachers to telecommunications professionals, workers are getting angry, they’re organising, and they’re taking their work to the streets when negotiation in other venues doesn’t work, not just in the …
Service Workers Deserve More
They’re all around you, often invisible. Not just the waiters and clerks and hotel desk workers, but the bussers and housekeepers, janitors and phone crews. They’re the people who make the world hum all around you, and they’re supposed to be as unobtrusive as possible while making your life as easy as possible. They are …
Stop Expecting Free Work from Women
For thousands of years, women have been saddled with the expectation that they perform labour for free to benefit the people around them. Put in position as caregivers, managers of households, and more, they’ve kept family units functional without compensation for generations. That’s something that started to be challenged in a more meaningful way in …
Looking to Domestic Workers for Labour Organising
I’m in love with this Labour Day interview with organiser Ai-Jen Poo by Sarah Jaffe, discussing organising among domestic workers and the victories they’ve had in recent years. Poo is a dedicated, fascinating, and driven organiser so it’s great to see her profiled, but more than that, the interview provides some insight into the shifting …
The Erosion of Worker Benefits
My father and I were talking the other day about the immense gains the labour movement made in the 20th century; not just at the start of the century when they fought child labour, exploitative working conditions, long hours, dangerous facilities, and other abuses, but also the introduction of benefits like pensions, health insurance, paid …
