This year, I’ve seen a number of people expressing shock and surprise about companies cutting worker hours or crafting contracts to keep hours to a minimum in order to avoid paying benefits. I am not a fan of turning up my nose and saying ‘and you’re acting like this is news?,’ but I would like […]
Tag Archives: labour
So Sorry A Labour Action Inconvenienced You
This summer and again earlier this month, the Bay Area faced a complex labour negotiation as BART employees fought for better wages and working conditions, and eventually called for strike actions to underscore the fact that they were deadly serious about sticking to their mission. As is often the case in such situations, BART brought […]
Want Fries With That?
It’s a joke that people toss off without much thought when you tell them you have a degree in some area of liberal arts that people deem ‘worthless,’ typically because it’s difficult to find work in that area (especially in the given economy). People with English degrees, for example, especially if they’ve been silly enough […]
Disposable Fashion, Disposable Labour, and Willful Ignorance
Between factory fires and building collapses, Bangladesh has been the scene of some truly horrific workplace disasters over the course of the last year or so. Incidents claiming the lives of hundreds of people have hit international headlines, horrifying members of the general public who are appalled by the working conditions exposed with these incidents. […]
Walking the Corn
While cotton may have snagged the tagline ‘the fabric of our lives,’ corn might as well be the grain of our lives in the United States, given how inextricably it’s woven into the food landscape. It’s not that people eat a great deal of corn as corn, but that corn and corn components are everywhere, […]
Having a Female CEO Doesn’t Make a Company ‘Woman-Friendly’
There’s been a lot of discussion in recent years about prominent female CEOs like Marissa Meyer and Sheryl Sandberg, with some feminists arguing that these women are making their companies more woman-friendly just by being in charge of them, that their hirings mark feminist victories that everyone should be celebrating. This has, as we know, […]
Blogging Against Disablism Day 2013: Accessible Labour Rights
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 […]
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 […]
On Working for Free
Periodically, this discussion flares up again, especially in the web-driven model of content production many of us work in today, where, let’s face it, freelancers are typically radically underpaid for their work—when they receive payment at all. Consequently, many of us are stuck cobbling bits and pieces of work together in a frenetic struggle to […]