“UC’s senior managers like many of their counterparts, deconstruct their own communities with secrecy, deception, banality, and/or exposure to harm” says @cnewf.bsky.social. utotherescue.blogspot.com/2025/09/line...

Maybe legal, but is it ethical? Loyola Marymount U. claims religious exemption, ditches NLRB process and refuses to talk to union of non-tenure faculty. www.latimes.com/business/sto...

Listen to historian @josephamccartin.bsky.social detail the essential role of Jews in the U.S. labor movement, which he had to explain to antiunion members of Congress trying to label contemporary unions with “antisemitism.” laborhistorytoday.podbean.com/e/unmasking-...

LAWCHA President @josephamccartin.bsky.social shared more reflections on last week's Unmasking Union Antisemitism hearing on the Labor History Today Podcast. laborhistorytoday.podbean.com

I've moved my note taking into Obsidian over the past 6 months. Bit of a learning curve, but feels like it's helping me track themes and connections better. A cool feature is the graph view of your notes #ResearchPractice

Campus solidarity alert: Unions representing more than 100,000 UC employees file lawsuit charging that federal government's demands for money and policy changes violate workers' free speech rights and the separation of federal and state powers. www.latimes.com/california/s...

"Naming names in a new ideological witch hunt shames the university and undermines its foundations."--UC Berkeley Faculty Association ucbfa.org/wp-content/u...

"Debating model sentience while ignoring the living, breathing people who make these systems run is rank hypocrisy. It’s a PR smoke screen. It’s a rhetorical sleight of hand. It’s the pot-maker calling the kettle a person." www.casilli.fr/2025/09/15/t...

Great conversation about organizing challenges and opportunities in higher education with @higheredlabor.bsky.social. The Trump assault will not only wreck our schools, it will wreck our state and local economies, and many lives. Time to get together and fight back!

“A Benediction for Chicago on the Eve of Occupation” from Dan Sinker. “There will never be more of them than there are of us.” ✊

The big workplace raids largely stopped under Bush 2 but they're good for ratings / quotas so they're back

An excellent thread on workplace rights and immigration raids.

Arresting 450 people at one worksite seems like legal over-reach, right? Sadly, the Supreme Court ruled back in 1984 that immigration agents could surround a worksite w/ armed guards and question everyone inside without violating 4th amendment rights. 🧵 /1 www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/u...

Federal agents detained 450 workers at a faculty construction site in Georgia. Expect that some of the detained are actually documented immigrants and/or citizens.

Don't be fooled by Trump's propaganda: the war on immigrants has still not helped US-born workers Today's data show US-born unemployment was higher every month of 2025 compared to previous years

The labor market continues to soften, according to the latest #JobsReport out this morning from the BLS. Payroll employment grew only 22,000 in August and revisions now show employment losses for June (-13,000). Over the last three months, job growth has slowed to just 29,000 on average. #EconSky

The past is a battlefield: Trump admin wants to erase California history because they think it’s mean to white settlers who stole the land of Californios during the Gold Rush. It’s part of a broader push to impose contemporary conservative views onto the past www.latimes.com/california/s...

Solidarity between UC unions will be essential to fight Trump's effort to sink UC and California. And unions need a seat at the table as we rethink higher education. Expanded state financing not a simple swap for federal funds. New priorities and expectations for public benefits of research

Good to see Univ of California leadership acknowledging the gravity and reality of federal attacks on UCLA, finally. And good to see state legislators are urging UC to resist. Next task: forging a new compact between the UC and the people of California. www.latimes.com/california/s...

If you work on any @UofCalifornia give this one your time. Uni leadership is belatedly asking us to "Stand Up For UC" while repeatedly revising faculty disciplinary policy to make standing up impossible. This essay asks, how did we get here? What now? utotherescue.blogspot.com/2025/09/why-...

How losing can lead to winning, sometimes. But the determining factor is less about individual expectations and more about organizing networks and movements. If Texas Dems' fight leads to victory, decisive factor will be that organizing structures capitalized on the fight to mobilize their bases

Majority of adults see decline of unions as bad news. Notable increase among Dems since last survey (to 80%+). Among Republicans a significant generational split: majority of young people see decline of unions as negative while 65+ Republicans unconcerned by decimation of organized labor

Spend Labor Day with the Labor Movement! Folks in SoCal: join us in Wilmington.

At a precarious moment for working people around the U.S., a new report from the UCLA IRLE and UC Berkeley Labor Center reveals how California workers got stronger in 2024. Read more: irle.ucla.edu/2025/08/26/c...

New report w/ @uclairle.bsky.social gives a snapshot of the CA labor movement. Key findings: ➡️CA union density is holding steady despite nationwide decline ✊Workers & unions held over 200 strikes or protests in CA in 2024 Read the full report at bit.ly/SOTU-2024

Mamdani effect in LA? Just answered political poll about city council elections were one of the choices for political identity was "Socialist." Not seen that before. Local polls here often probing for weak support of incumbent Dems to be exploited by conservatives running as fake Dems

New report on California unions on the cusp of big changes. Unions led 100s of strikes and protest, won vast majority of elections in 2024. Looking to future, state level policy likely to play bigger role.

Completely engaging conversation on local school financing--no really! Who is doing this work on higher education financing? Think we all need to get more specific in our critiques of status quo, and more expansive in our proposals for the future. Everything is shifting right now

For years, countries accepted their dependence on US tech companies. That needs to change. This week @ceciliarikap.bsky.social joins @parismarx.com to discuss why it’s so important for governments to champion digital sovereignty that puts people first. Full ep: techwontsave.us/episode/290_...

“I suspect that the Trump administration, after going through this process of brutally deporting people, will turn around and propose a guest worker program in order to maintain a docile immigrant workforce.” My comment to the LA Times www.latimes.com/california/s...

Antifascism, the back to school edition: “We’re going to need to politicize this fight. It’s not an economic strike around our job conditions – it’s a political strike around the future of the sector”—Todd Wolfson, AAUP. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Unions do more than just improve wages and benefits. They build stronger communities and strengthen democracy. A new report from @epi.org shows that where unions thrive, communities thrive. Imagine what we could achieve if more people had a voice at work. www.epi.org/publication/...

Looks like U of Oregon administration is using the Trump crisis as excuse to fire faculty and close departments. Faculty union gearing up for a fight

You can be sure a key sector of university officialdom across the land sees this as the salvation from their labor troubles.

“Labor’s Answer to Automation: Less Hours, More Pay” Right in 1955. Right in 2025.

Now that Trump Admin is purging museums of ideas that contradict its world view, hurry to see the National Archives excellent Power and Light, Russell Lee's 1946 coal survey. Part of the settlement to the 7-week miners' strike was this survey. Glad I saw this treasure before it is disappeared.

At the beautiful Laborers’ Union local 300 hall to celebrate organizers past, present, and future who link the fight for social justice in the U.S. and Mexico.

Organizers can learn from this story of union success: community-based unionism isn’t necessarily at odds with traditional workplace organizing. Organizing for the long haul in the community can build a base for workplace power. forgeorganizing.org/article/how-...

A thread on fear of cities. I grew up in 70s & 80s in a mostly working class white town I didn’t know at the time was segregated from the small, Blacker city across the river. My mom was a rare lefty who loved cities, but I absorbed attitudes at school: “cities are scary.” 1/

Two-step fight against the Trump Extortion Machine, says @cnewf.bsky.social. 1) Sue ‘em and sue ‘em again. 2) Generate counter-cultural programming, celebrate human learning and expose the fascists as crybabies. But 1st, gotta convince Uni admin to fight utotherescue.blogspot.com/2025/08/line...

Last week we held our 3rd Strategic Labor Research Conferences with 200 labor and community organization researchers learning and sharing the best practices to move from data to action. Read all about it!

Great thread on AI generated “historical” images as culture and commerce—in a bad way. Also shows how the actual work of historians is not so open to AI automation as assumed by AI promotion industrial complex, and why AI promoters might want to sideline human historians

Unsatisfied w/ social media for news? Read this (re)introduction to the logic of RSS feed readers as a way to curate your own news feed. It's super easy and helps you engage platforms more mindfully Some power options new to me: you can set a feed for a Google search and CourtListener dockets.

The strategy of UC and UCLA leadership was to obey in advance and keep a low profile. That didn’t work. Time to pivot, recognize the true nature of the conflict, shore up state-level support and fight. The old scale of federal funding isn’t coming back any time soon… www.latimes.com/california/s...

Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of the third annual UCLA Strategic Labor Research Conference! The conference brings together hundreds of social movement researchers from across the U.S. for a weekend of dynamic workshops, panels and discussions 💻 📈 🔍 irle.ucla.edu/research/ucl...

Power from the Past: video from 2003 Immigrant Worker Freedom Rides where organizers used nonviolent tactics to challenge the power of the Border Patrol. Context different today, but the bravery of these organizers is palpable, subjecting themselves to possible deportation, trusting in solidarity

Microsoft funded report getting uncritical circulation purports to document which occupations are most likely to face displacement from "AI" automation based on analysis of LLM user queries. Historians are #2. Data scientists down near #30. Interesting

1/ Article I of the US Constitution involves powers of Congress. As of a few minutes ago, several sections have been deleted from the Constitution on the gov't's website, suggesting some things don't need congressional approval. Key things, like:

To our campus leaders, I ask: What kind of "negotiation" is possible in this context? Also: "Experts say any payment would be a political liability for the university and state leaders in deep-blue California, where Trump’s policies are highly unpopular." www.latimes.com/california/s...

Amendment by html, a little known facet of constitutional originalism. Congressional website copy of the US Constitution deleted last 2 sections of Article I that list powers denied to Congress and the States