Our research, done in consultation with the hotel workers’ union, reveals on the one hand, a morbid correlation between the reopening of tourism and deaths across the state, and on the other, the life-affirming ethic of collective care, with unionized workers persistently pushing for safe hotels, recall rights, better pay, and the well-being of all hospitality workers, their communities, as well as tourists.
Low wages and the necessity to work continue to undergird the Vietnamese economy. A web of international finance and corporations like Intel, Samsung, and Nike systematically transfer labor power and its value to their balance sheets and to shareholders. This is simply an old form of imperialism dressed up now in the guise of the free market.
In March 2020, New York City became the U.S. epicenter of the emerging Covid-19 crisis. Yet neither city leaders, nor school district officials, nor teacher union leadership provided a meaningful response to a mounting public health crisis. Instead, the city’s fledgling social justice teachers’ union caucus, MORE, rose to [...]
I found that to get the same age-adjusted death rates of the black population in 2014, the white population in 2020 would have had to have at least around 400,000 excess deaths in the COVID pandemic. And in order for white life expectancy to plummet down to the best-ever level of black life expectancy would take between 700,000 and one million excess white deaths in 2020.
The growing concentration of value and knowledge in a few big corporations that became intellectual monopolies induced different forms of academic capitalism. I present three types of academic capitalist university – teaching institutions, subordinate research universities, and academic intellectual monopolies – and explore the consequences for knowledge as commons and for academic workers, all of which have worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In the United States, delinquent credit lines as a share of both total consumer, auto loan, and credit card debt steadily grew over the last two and half years. Over the same period, residential-mortgage delinquencies rapidly declined, essentially returning to their pre-2007 levels. These divergent trends point to the relative financial security of upper-income and the increasing fragility of lower-income households prior to the pandemic. How are working families in America getting by in the midst of a capitalist crisis unlike any other?
The new Chinese land reform and the attendant countermovement have given rise to a new round of rural struggles over land and livelihood security. These constitute an integral part of the movement of the Chinese working class, of which the 290 million rural workers are a major force.
Our current COVID moment has fuelled hopes for the embrace of progressive economic policies, basic income included. But Finland’s experiment suggests that not all applications of BI are necessarily progressive. Indeed, it is important to register that policy experiments precisely operate as a means for the state to open out new frontiers. In this instance an experimental policy opened out new routes to promote the restructuring of labour supply.
There is probably no better example of why “it is much easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” than governments’ responses to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The problem is not so much that the structural and ideological hegemony of capital accumulation prevents us from [...]
How we navigate this moment of intense uncertainty and collective anxiety will shape the future. Thinking about the many ways that our precarity manifests will be crucial to avoid re-inscribing the inequalities and injustices of the pre-coronavirus world.
