American Worker

02/09/2024

Don't post here too often, check out the discussion and follow the seach for The American Worker here:

20/08/2024

DETROIT: FREE Screening of "American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs" followed by conversation with close friends and family of Jimmy and Grace. Saturday, August 31, 2024 at 1pm. Genesis Lutheran Church, 7200 Mack Avenue.

25/07/2024

"We need artists to create new images that will open up space in our hearts and minds to imagine and create another America that will be viewed by the world as a beacon rather than as a danger." —Grace Lee Boggs

Graphic by Cori Nakamura Lin, available at https://tinyurl.com/BoggsShirt

18/07/2024

"THESE ARE NOT NORMAL TIMES" —Grace Lee Boggs, excerpt from "These Are the Times to Grow Our Souls" in The Next American Revolution, available from UC Press: https://tinyurl.com/boggs-next

18/07/2024

Workers' Inquiry Dot Work, a new initiative to publish workers’ inquiries and first-person narratives of work in the US, has just launched its first workers' inquiry “Class Composition in the Café Sector.”

What do café workers think? What do we want? And how do we share those conversations that take place in “walk ins” or walking to the bus after our shifts as to amplify our voices? Survey: http://workersinquiry.work

Tell all your cafe worker and service industry friends!

Cafés provide us our morning coffee as well as places to gather and work. Although, for workers in the café sector there are real challenges—low wages and high turnover, bully bosses and difficult customers. We worked through the pandemic and were called essential. Now we spend more time with cu...

03/07/2024

Picked up my tshirt and you should too!!

THE ONLY WAY TO SURVIVE IS BY TAKING CARE OF ONE ANOTHER
Grace put into words what so many of us are feeling in these perilous times. Help the Boggs Foundation spread the vital lessons of Jimmy and Grace with our new t-shirt & hoodie designed by artist Cori Nakamura Lin for Grace's 109th birthday, available at this link: http://tinyurl.com/BoggsStore

28/06/2024

HBD Grace Lee Boggs!

13/06/2024

Join us on 6/21 for a workshop on workers' inquiry in Rochester, NY! All welcome!

How Can First-Person Narratives of Work and Workers’ Inquiry Aid Organizing?Join us Friday, June 21st from 6:00-8:00PM in Rochester, NY for a workshop on workers' inquiry. Free and all are welcome. First-person narratives and workers’ inquiries are strategic interventions to grasp power in the w...

31/05/2024

To the archives! American Worker is heading to the Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor & Urban Affairs in a few weeks to read through the Boggs and Glaberman papers as well as the United Auto Workers archives for the GM plant in Linden, NJ during the late-1940s. Search continues!

30/05/2024

Will be offering this workshop on workers' inquiry in Rochester, NY on June 21st with additional dates in Boston, MA and Portland, ME later in the summer: https://www.readingstruggles.info/post/how-can-first-person-narratives-of-work-and-workers-inquiry-aid-organizing

30/05/2024

50% at including my 2017 title Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible!

There's so much heaviness in the world right now and of course, we often turn to books to help us think through it all. Here are just a few of the titles we've published that we have been sending out to student encampments and recommending to folks trying to make sense of our current moment. The coupon STUDENTINTIFADA will give you 50% off all these titles—and everything else published by AK Press—through 5/31 at akpress.org.

And as always, 🇵🇸

11/05/2024

Scontras Center Teaching Fellow American Worker Co-Edits New Edition of “Real World Labor” from Dollars & Sense: Real World Economics with and https://maineaflcio.org/news/scontras-center-teaching-fellow-co-edits-new-edition-real-world-labor

Scontras Center teaching fellow Kevin Van Meter is one of a group of labor scholars who contributed to the new edition of

01/05/2024

A May Day Tradition: reading and watching Peter Linebaugh on the green, the red, and the wonderful history of May Day!

Sunday is May Day, and organizers and activists across the United States are planning celebrations to mark the 10th anniversary of the massive May Day marches of 2006. That year, more than 1.5 million people took to the streets to support workers’ and immigrant rights. It was one of the largest da...

24/04/2024

Notes from Below returns with another great issue of worker writing. "Workers write here about their experiences at work and their organizing as care and support workers, energy workers, clinical support workers, school workers, and Palestinian workers." Just arrived today!

13/04/2024

On Tuesday, April 2nd, 2024, workers from five Blue Bottle coffee shops—owned by Nestlé, one of the world’s largest food companies—marched on their bosses in Boston, Massachusetts to demand voluntary recognition of their union. Labor educator Kevin Van Meter (he / him) speaks with Rocky Prull (they / them) of the newly launched Blue Bottle Independent Union (BBIU). BBIU is “an independent, rank-and-file led union fighting for living wages, democratic control of the workplace, and protection from harassment!”

Blue Bottle Workers Launch Independent Union. Read Five Questions with an Organizer.

04/04/2024

01/04/2024

"The ability of workers to govern their own unions, workplaces and communities can only be expressed with a political project that makes such governing possible. Resurgent working-class self-activity is being expressed in new union drives, now is the time to revisit historical examples of labor education. I propose that it can not only can save democracy—but create it."

Read my latest article "Labor Education for All Workers" over at New Politics magazine!

As the cause of labor has long declared “a new social order is needed.” Labor education will help create the possibility for this new social order—democratic control of our workplaces and communities—to emerge.