Jenny Brown

After signing a critical letter to their boss, 139 EPA workers were put under investigation and on a 2-week paid administrative leave July 3.

Imagine you get a letter from your manager a week before you are set to teach classes, removing you from teaching duties but saying you’ll get paid anyway. This odd experience has happened to around 137 graduate students at Columbia University in New York City who teach core curriculum, language, and writing classes. They are members of Student Workers of Columbia (SWC), Auto Workers Local 2710. Getting paid to not teach might sound pretty good, but in fact the university is hiring adjuncts with no union contract to do the work of union members.

Review of Jaz Brisack, Get on the Job and Organize (Atria/One Signal, 2025). Starbucks Workers United recently celebrated the unionization of their 600th store, disproving reams of conventional wisdom: you can’t organize small shops… you can’t organize high-turnover workplaces… you can’t organize young people. For a gripping first-person account of how it happened, read Jaz Brisack’s new book Get on the Job and Organize.

Imagine you get a letter from your manager a week before you are set to teach classes, removing you from teaching duties but saying you’ll get paid anyway. This odd experience has happened to around 137 graduate students at Columbia University in New York City who teach core curriculum, language, and writing classes. They are members of Student Workers of Columbia (SWC), Auto Workers Local 2710. Getting paid to not teach might sound pretty good, but in fact the university is hiring adjuncts with no union contract to do the work of union members.

Review of What the Boss Doesn’t Want Us to Know: Discovering Power and Winning Campaigns by Tom Juravich, Olivia Geho, and Andrew Gorry (PM Press, 2025) When workers at one company started researching their employer, says a union leader in What the Boss Doesn’t Want Us to Know, “it felt like the curtain was pulled back on Oz. All these things that didn’t make sense to them for so long suddenly made sense.” In their new book, Juravich, Geho, and Gorry share their experience researching private-sector employers and helping unions design strategic campaigns based on what they’ve learned.

Review of What the Boss Doesn’t Want Us to Know: Discovering Power and Winning Campaigns by Tom Juravich, Olivia Geho, and Andrew Gorry (PM Press, 2025) When workers at one company started researching their employer, says a union leader in What the Boss Doesn’t Want Us to Know, “it felt like the curtain was pulled back on Oz. All these things that didn’t make sense to them for so long suddenly made sense.” In their new book, Juravich, Geho, and Gorry share their experience researching private-sector employers and helping unions design strategic campaigns based on what they’ve learned.

Flight attendants with Air Canada and subsidiary Air Canada Rouge walked out early August 17. As expected, the Liberal government ordered them back to work 12 hours later, declaring their strike unlawful. In a bold move with wide implications, the 10,000 striking flight attendants defied the order. They’d voted 99.7 percent to strike earlier this month. Their union, an affiliate of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, said the back-to-work order violated their right to strike, and CUPE president Mark Hancock ripped it up.

Braving retaliation, thousands of federal workers across six agencies have signed open letters charging that their workplaces are being hamstrung or dismantled by the Trump administration. They join federal unionists at dozens more workplaces who have been sounding the alarm to Congress and the public.

United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain recently laid out four priorities he says should form the nucleus of a workers’ political program. And he said that a broad strike in May 2028 is one way to fight for those priorities. Fain spoke on September 30 at the release of a new report by the Center for Working Class Politics and allied groups.

Unionized Starbucks workers are electing strike captains and getting customers to pledge they won't cross picket lines. They’re amassing in front of stores with picket signs, borrowing a slogan that UPS Teamsters used during their 2023 contract campaign: “Just Practicing for a Just Contract.” Thirty-eight stores held practice pickets in early October, and starting October 25, 80 more stores plan to hold pickets and sign up customers to a “No Contract, No Coffee” pledge, promising not to patronize any Starbucks in case of a strike.