Lost in Work, with Amelia Horgan

What is work, actually? The question is surprisingly hard to answer once you start to dig into it. But in order to challenge the conditions under which we work, it’s worth actually thinking about why work is the way it is, and what makes it—for lack of a better word—suck. Amelia Horgan’s new book Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism looks at these questions and asks how we can rearrange work to better suit workers. She sat down with Belabored this week to talk about it.

We look at the NLRB ruling that the Bessemer Amazon workers can have a new union election, the ongoing nurses’ strike at St. Vincent Hospital, and the questions surrounding pandemic unemployment expansion with Andy Stettner of The Century Foundation. We also remember Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, who we lost last week age seventy-two. For Argh, we consider the Activision Blizzard workers walkout, and the working-class gaze of the Ashcan School.

Last month, roughly 40,000 UK rail workers with the National Union of Rail, Maritime, and Transport Workers (RMT) went on strike for three days, bringing major portions of the British rail system to a halt in a historic show of collective strength. This week, after receiving a contract offer from state-owned Network Rail that union leaders described as “paltry,” the RMT announced that workers at Network Rail and the train operating companies will engage in another day of strike action on Wednesday, July 27.

Audio

From Amazon to Starbucks, America Is Unionizing. Will Politics Catch Up?

A debate on how unions build power today and whether politicians — particularly Democrats — are still behind them.