By Alexander Fischer The Temple University Graduate Student Association (TUGSA 6290), a union that represents more than 750 graduate student workers at Temple struck for over a month from late January to early March 2023. TUGSA, the only graduate student union in Pennsylvania, demanded a living wage, greater parental and bereavement leave, and dependent healthcare. Founded … [Read more...] about Striking Power: How Temple University Graduate Student Workers Won a New Contract
labor movement
Let’s push for a radical labor movement in 2023
By Michael D. Yates The year 2022 saw a significant increase in working-class unrest in the United States. Millions of workers quit their jobs in 2021, and this trend has continued in 2022. Most moved on to different employment, while others continued their education or retired. Recently, many Twitter employees quit in response to the severe force reduction … [Read more...] about Let’s push for a radical labor movement in 2023
The Homestead Steel Strike
By Lenny Flank By the 1890s, the United States, which had been a largely agricultural society, had been transformed into a rapidly expanding industrial powerhouse, with factories and mills sprouting up in every urban area. The US became a lopsided economy, with a small handful of super-rich making immense profits from a great mass of poorly paid and ill-treated immigrant … [Read more...] about The Homestead Steel Strike
Notes from the Editor – Left Turn #8
Let us Burn All Illusions in 2021 Left Turn welcomes the year 2021 without any illusions about the nature of the system that produced the severe political, economic, and public health crises of 2020 and the new horrors surely on their way if we as a society fail to counteract the ingrained tendencies and deliberate policies that have produced the present unsustainable … [Read more...] about Notes from the Editor – Left Turn #8
May Day History: The Haymarket Riot
by Lenny Flank In the early United States, labor unions were outlawed—they were considered to be illegal conspiracies in restraint of “free trade.” That changed in 1842, when, in the Hunt case, the courts ruled that collective bargaining was legal and that workers could form unions and associations. At first, labor unions were small, weak, and rarely extended beyond the … [Read more...] about May Day History: The Haymarket Riot
Notes from the Editors (Left Turn #4)
Excessive gun violence and mass shootings have become the norm in the US, so has the trite and totally ineffective response of offering “our thoughts and prayers” by the governing political elite. There were about 252 mass shootings in the first 215 days of 2019. About 35% of mass shooters are young white men with prior training in how to use guns — often learned as high school … [Read more...] about Notes from the Editors (Left Turn #4)
‘Working People Will Make a Better World’: An Interview with Labor Historian Priscilla Murolo
Interviewed by Andy Piascik Priscilla Murolo teaches history at Sarah Lawrence College, where she formerly directed the graduate program in Women’s History. She also teaches in the Union Leadership and Activism Master’s Program at the University of Massachusetts. Beginning in the1960s, she has been involved in the women’s movement, labor organizing and many community … [Read more...] about ‘Working People Will Make a Better World’: An Interview with Labor Historian Priscilla Murolo