USA/Canada

US Teamsters: the giant strike that didn't happen

On an average day, US corporation United Parcel Service (UPS) moves the equivalent of 6% of US and 2% of global GDP! A strike by its heavily unionised US workforce – 330,000 International Brotherhood of Teamsters members out of half a million workers – would have been an event of global significance. That seemed to be in the offing this summer, but now won’t happen. On 22 August it was announced that 86% of Teamsters members voting on a new “contract” (collective agreement), on a 58% turnout, had opted to accept. This despite a vocal and by many accounts unexpectedly vigorous No campaign. In...

America braced for Trump trials

Your honour, I have stated in this court that I am opposed to the form of our present government; that I am opposed to the social system in which we live; that I believe in the change of both but by perfectly peaceable and orderly means…. So spoke Eugene V Debs, Socialist Party candidate for the US presidency, on trial for sedition in 1918. Debs had campaigned against conscription in World War I, opposed as he was to the slaughter of millions of working people in what was an inter-imperialist war. He proudly pleaded guilty, was sentenced to ten years and launched his 1920 presidential campaign...

The US left, Ukraine, and Biden

While Republican politicians are queuing up to take on Donald Trump for the party’s nomination next year, there’s hardly anything going on in the other camp. Unless he falls ill or changes his mind, Joe Biden will undoubtedly be the Democratic Party candidate. Only three people with any name recognition have challenged him inside the Democratic Party or to its left. They are a diverse crowd, but one thing unites them — and it’s not what you’d expect. To the left of the Democrats, Cornel West has announced he’s running for president. It’s unclear which party will support him as he initially...

Some “affirmative action” still thrives

Contrary to what is being reported, the Republican-controlled US Supreme Court has not prohibited affirmative action. It has only prohibited affirmative action that does not benefit white people. For example, the Republican majority on the court allowed “legacy” admissions. That means that if your daddy (and it probably was your daddy) went to Harvard (and your grandpa also probably preceded him there), then it’s fine for you to have a leg up. But since legacies inevitably favor those who were privileged in the past — meaning white people — then this means that pro-white affirmative action is...

The end of affirmative action

“Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential treatment of the Negro is raised,” wrote Martin Luther King in 1963, “some of our friends recoil in horror.” ( Why We Can’t Wait ) The US Supreme Court, nourished by newly minted Federalist Society jurists — and no friend of African Americans, delivered the coup de grace to affirmative action in higher education. This counterrevolution was decades in the making, the culmination of a steady erosion since the late 1980s. Even the 1977 Bakke decision upheld affirmative action not on the basis of compensation, but because the experience of...

What Washington can teach London about history

Last week, on a visit to Washington, D.C., I spent some time in two new museums and walked away wondering why we don’t have museums like that in the UK. The first was the National Museum of African American History and Culture. This museum, established by an act of Congress in 2003 and finally opened just seven years ago, is enormously popular. It tells the story of the Black experience in America, from slave ships right up until the Black Lives Matter movement. One cannot walk through its many rooms and not be moved. Some of the rooms warn the visitor: a thick red border around an image is...

US bosses pursue child labour

The right and far-right in the US are emboldened and on the attack. Having already flooded state legislatures this year with hundreds of bills aiming to smash the rights of LGBTQ+ people, many of which explicitly target the rights of LGBTQ+ youth, the conservative right are likewise aiming for an unprecedented expansion of child labour. As the cost of living spirals, the right are waging amongst the most flagrantly abusive forms of class warfare; rolling back weak laws at the state and federal level to force kids from poor families into work. Over the past three years, at least ten states have...

Biden fêtes Modi

In 2005 the government of George W Bush banned Narendra Modi from the US for his role in the 2002 Gujarat massacres , in which thousands of Muslims were killed. Now, after nine years transforming India as a whole into an authoritarian ethno-nationalist regime, Modi is being welcomed by a supposedly progressive US government. Despite warnings from South Asian American and human rights organisations about the "fast autocratising" Indian government's "escalating attacks on human rights and democracy", on 22 June the Indian prime minister will meet Joe Biden and address a joint session of the two...

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