This summer, Hollywood came to a standstill. For the first time in 63 years, writers and actors went on strike together as both the Writers Guild of America (WGA), representing 11,500 writers, and SAG-AFTRA, a 160,000-strong coalition of actors and media professionals, failed to settle contract negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television […]
Tag: unions
Bigger than Baseball: An Endless Lockout, The Labor Movement, and America’s National Pastime
On December 2nd, 2021, something strange happened. Major League Baseball scrubbed player faces, highlight reels and other media from its website. Where videos of iconic Yankees once stood, the only thing visible now was a letter from the commissioner of the MLB, Rob Manfred. The reason? The Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) between the owners of […]
A New Lochner Era
On February 22nd, 1975, members of Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers (UFW) began a 110 mile walk from San Francisco to Modesto, protesting the poor working conditions of the Gallo Winery. Only a few hundred joined Chavez at first, and he didn’t expect many more. By the time he reached the Central Valley, however, the […]
Can the Invisible Hand Guide Us to Racial Justice?
Daunte Wright was just a year older than me. He was a father, a recent graduate, a basketball fan, and most of all, beloved by his friends and family. On April 11, Wright was fatally shot by white police officer Kimberly Potter during a traffic stop in which she claims she meant to taze him […]
Stronger than Steel: A Small Alabama Town, The Richest Man in the World and the Future of the Labor Movement
Twenty minutes south of Birmingham, just up the road from a state park, lies the town of Bessemer, Alabama. Termed the “Marvel City” for its industrial prowess, and named for the British inventor who created the famous steelmaking process, Bessemer has since fallen on hard times. Deindustrialization gutted the region, and more than 27 percent […]
Mauritania: A Place of Continuing Slavery
Moulkheir Mint Yarba tends goats in the Sahara Desert and works long hours in the sun for little to no pay. Yarba constantly fears the prospect of rape and on one day, upon returning home, she found that her master had left her young infant out in the sun to die. Following the death of […]
Tenure on Trial
In 2012, a study of fifteen year-olds from 34 developed countries ranked U.S. students 17th, scoring 25th in math, 17th in science, and 14th in reading. Yet the U.S. ranked 5th in spending for students. As a student from Los Angeles Unified School District, these dismal scores make complete sense to me. Amid the constant […]