Fed-Up Railroad Workers Ready to Strike

If 115,000 angry freight rail workers defy government pressure and go on strike, commerce in the United States will slow to a crawl.

These essential workers are furious about their deplorable and dangerous working conditions. Their anger and readiness to fight showed when in July, members of one industry union, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, voted by over 99% to authorize a strike.

Midterm Elections: And the winner is … not Trump!

The big news about the 2022 midterm election is that the news is not as big as expected. Or, at least, not as earthshaking as prematurely claimed by the Republican Party, feared by their Democratic counterparts, and predicted by the punditry.

Any reflection on the meaning of an election must start with a couple often-ignored caveats. For one, the U.S. has lousy voter turnout, though it’s been growing recently. Turnout this time seems to have been relatively large (with ballots still being counted as of this writing).

And no wonder: a lot was at stake!

After Their Historic Strike MN Nurses Are Still Fighting for Justice

In the seven and half years Ali Marcanti has been working as a nurse, she has been yelled at, pushed against a wall, and put in ​“all sorts of shitty situations,” she says. But she never actually cried on the job until the winter of 2021, she recalls, when a Covid patient in his 70s who had been sitting alone in a room for hours turned to her, in tears, and said, ​“You were supposed to take care of me.”

Ten Lessons for Today’s Unions from Labor’s Militant History

 As the inequalities in wealth continue to grow, some have argued that the decline in the labor movement is a strong contributing factor to this tendency. During its period of ascendancy in the 1930s through the 1950s, organized labor scored huge gains for working people and narrowed the income inequalities that hit a zenith in the 1920s. Accordingly, it is instructive to take a retrospective look back at the labor movement in its period of militancy to benefit from lessons learned during this climactic period.

Defend the Indian Child Welfare Act!

Lisa Herthel and Sid Perrault organized a gathering at the Duluth City Hall on November 1, 2022 to raise awareness and to protest the attack on the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA).  On November 9th, 2022, the United States Supreme Court will hear a case that threatens tribal sovereignty. Brackeen v. Haaland could overturn the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), a federal law enacted in 1978 in response to Native children being removed from their families and communities, and adopted out to non-Native families, even when fit and willing relatives were available.

Halloween Unmasked: A Socialist Feminist History

Halloween is here again. Homes, stores, and communities are adorned in the imagery of bats, pumpkins, black cats, spiders, and creepy things. Adults and children are busy with costumes, carving pumpkins, going to corn mazes, enjoying the brilliant hues of fall, and consuming pumpkin spice everything. It is the time of year for scarecrows, migrating birds, gray skies, and empty fields. But behind the holiday fun is a world of workers, oppressions, and historical wrongs.

End the U.S. Embargo on Cuba!

Activists in Duluth held a rally in Duluth on Oct. 29 calling for the United States to end its decades long embargo against Cuba.  The protest was sponsored by the MN Cuba Committee, the Solidarity Committee of the Americas, Twin Ports DSA, Grandmothers for Peace and the Northwoods Socialist Collection.

The action was held in solidarity with similar events all over the country being held this week, as the United Nations prepares once again to condemn the decades long embargo.