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We All Stand on Gloria Steinem’s Shoulders
Those who don’t know the full history of the feminist icon have little understanding of how far we have come, how we got here, and what still needs to change to make America more livable, humane, democratic, and inclusive.
Sep 13, 2026
Gloria Steinem, who died September 2 at ninety-two, was the leading voice and public face of second-wave feminism that began in the 1960s. Thanks to the tireless work of Steinem and others, America is today a more inclusive society for women in both attitude and practice. It is a credit to her generation of activists that later generations now embrace feminism’s goals that were once considered radical, impractical, or even a violation of human nature. Steinem “awakened a vast and often skeptical public to problems like domestic violence, the lack of affordable child care, and unfair hiring practices,” President Barack Obama said in 2013 when he awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “She also changed how women thought about themselves.”
Today, 75 percent of Americans (including 64 percent of Republicans) think Congress should guarantee twelve weeks of annual paid family and medical leave to all employees. Almost three-quarters support government-funded universal childcare. Also, 57 percent want Congress to pass legislation to codify nationwide rights to abortion, contraception, and in vitro fertilization and 62 percent think it is the responsibility of the federal government to make sure all Americans have health care coverage – a long-time part of feminism’s agenda.
Americans also support equal pay for women and strong protections against and punishment for sexual harassment and rape. They believe that couples should share housework and childcare. They don’t think that gender should limit a person’s ability to enter professions once dominated by men, such as law, engineering, medicine, construction, journalism, and military service.
There are more Americans who embrace these goals than there are self-identified feminists. This might be a good thing. It means that many feminist ideas have become so mainstream that Americans take them for granted. But it could also mean that our society may not appreciate—or even know about—the struggles that previous generations of women endured to change attitudes and practices and win rights.
Born in 1934, Steinem had a peripatetic childhood. Her family dealt with challenging financial circumstances, which may explain why she viewed women’s issues through the lens of class as well as gender. Her father, Leo, was a Jewish itinerant antiques dealer routinely on the precipice of financial ruin. Her mother, Ruth, was a former journalist born to a Presbyterian family. After her parents divorced when she was eleven, she and her mother moved into a condemned farmhouse. Her mother suffered from depression, and Steinem became her caretaker, cook, and housekeeper.
Part of what gave her the resilience to persevere was the example of her paternal grandmother, Pauline Steinem, who was president of the Ohio Suffrage Association from 1908 to 1911, a leader of the National Woman Suffrage Association, and the first woman to be elected to the Toledo Board of Education. In a testimonial to her grandmother, Steinem noted that in her campaign for the school board, “she was elected on a coalition ticket with the socialists and the anarchists.” In the 1930s, Pauline helped rescue many members of her family who lived in Germany from the Nazis. Although Pauline died when Gloria was five, she left her what Gloria later called vivid “sense memories” of her strength, courage, and intelligence.
Gloria was raised without much religious involvement; ironically, it was her Christian mother who taught her to be proud of her Jewish heritage, educating her daughter about the horrors of the Holocaust. “Never in my life have I identified myself as a Christian,” Steinem once said, “but wherever there is antisemitism, I identify as a Jew.”
In 1956, Steinem graduated from Smith College, where she majored in government and graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. After a few years living on a fellowship in India, where she was inspired by the nonviolent movement led by Mahatma Ghandi that overthrew British colonialism, she moved to New York City to pursue a career as a journalist.
No sooner had she died when some social media warriors started attacking her as a one-time CIA agent. The reality is more complicated. Around 1958, she worked for the Independent Research Service (IRS), which was set up to recruit American college students to attend World Youth Festivals sponsored by the Soviet Union and countries in its orbit. It was the height of the Cold War and the goal was to have liberal non-Communist voices at those events. The IRS was covertly funded by the CIA through foundations, as were many liberal nonprofit organizations and publications at the time, including the National Student Association - a connection that Ramparts magazine exposed in 1967. Steinem never denied her work for the IRC and was not ashamed of it, although it is likely that she did not know where the money came from. She was not involved in the CIA’s nefarious activities of overthrowing democratic governments, which came to light long after she spent three years with the IRS in her twenties. These attacks on Steinem’s work for the IRS are a cheap shot, meant to discredit her feminist and progressive credentials.
Steinem came of age in the 1950s, when women were treated like second-class citizens in almost every aspect of society. When she returned to the U.S., she had to overcome many gender barriers to make her way in the world of journalism. (The National Press Club didn’t allow women members until 1971). She worked for a new magazine of political satire, Help!, and contributed short articles to women’s magazines such as Glamour and Ladies’ Home Journal. After writing several pieces for Esquire without being credited, she finally published her first bylined article in the men’s magazine in 1962. The article, published a year before Betty Friedan’s pathbreaking manifesto, The Feminine Mystique, was about the then-new contraceptive pill. She examined the fact that women often had to choose between a career and marriage. “The only trouble with sexually liberating women,” Steinem ended the article, “is that there aren’t enough sexually liberated men to go around.” The following year, Steinem made a big splash with “A Bunny’s Tale” in Show magazine. Steinem got a job working at a Playboy Club for the article, which exposed the decidedly unglamorous working conditions faced by the club’s waitresses, who were required to wear a corset, rabbit ears, cotton tails, and high heels.
Steinem made a living as a freelance writer, profiling celebrities and writing about popular culture for major publications. But she could not persuade editors to assign her serious political subjects. Eventually she began writing a column for New York, which she helped launch in 1968. There she covered a variety of topics: Ho Chi Minh’s years living in New York, wounded veterans returning from Vietnam, neighborhood battles over childcare centers, antiwar demonstrations, migrant workers, the New York City mayoral race, and the 1968 presidential campaign.
Two articles in the magazine established her as a feminist spokesperson. In 1969, she was outraged by what she heard at a “speak out” of women discussing how their illegal abortions made them feel like criminals. Later that year, Steinem, who had an abortion in England in 1957, wrote her first explicitly feminist essay, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” which profiled the burgeoning women’s movement. The second was a 1970 essay in Time called “What It Would Be Like if Women Win.” There Steinem predicted that feminism would liberate men as well as women. If women could have equal power, she argued, if homosexuals had the right to marry and women could refuse to have sex, then men would no longer be “the only ones to support the family, get drafted, bear the strain of power and responsibility.”
Although Steinem wrote hundreds of articles and eleven books and gave thousands of speeches, her most significant accomplishments involve the creation of two influential institutions -- the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) and Ms. magazine.
In 1971 Steinem joined a bipartisan group of women—including Friedan, Congresswoman Bella Abzug, former Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, and Dorothy Height (president of the National Council of Negro Women)—to launch the NWPC. They believed that by increasing women’s participation in politics, it would be easier to pass legislation to eliminate sex discrimination and to bring about greater legal, economic, and social equality.
“This is no simple reform,” Steinem said at the group’s founding convention. “It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.”
Ms. was the first modern feminist periodical with a national readership. From its start in 1972, it challenged conventional wisdom in articles like “How to Write Your Marriage Contract,” “Can Women Love Women?” “The Black Family and Feminism,” “Welfare Is a Women’s Issue,” and “Down with Sexist Upbringing.” In its first year, Ms. made history when it published the names of fifty-three prominent women, including Steinem and tennis star Billie Jean King, who acknowledged having had abortions when it was still illegal in most of the country, before the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. Its 1976 cover story on battered women—which featured a photo of a woman with a bruised face—was the first major exposé of the problem of domestic violence.
The magazine pioneered investigative stories about overseas sweatshops, sex trafficking, the wage gap, the glass ceiling, women’s health (and the medical establishment’s sexism), sexual harassment, and date rape. It explained and advocated for the Equal Rights Amendment, rated presidential candidates on women’s issues, reported on feminist protests against pornography, exposed the influence of sexist advertising on women’s self-images, and acknowledged race and class differences within the feminist movement. Ms. injected these issues into the political debate at a time when they were considered too radical for the mainstream media to cover—or at least to cover fairly.
During her first several decades as a public figure, Steinem had to endure media portrayals that called her as the “pin-up girl of the intelligentsia” or a “willowy beauty, 34-24-34.” She also had to deal with some feminist leaders, particularly Friedan, who resented her visibility in the media. But more than any other figure, Steinem was the public face of modern feminism, a constant presence on college campuses at union halls and protest rallies, on TV talk shows and in media profiles.
Steinem often used outrageous ideas to shake up her readers and audiences. In 1971 she stunned parents and alums at the Smith College graduation by quoting her friend Flo Kennedy’s observation that “there are only a few jobs that actually require a penis or vagina.” She once told an audience of CEOs that a fair society would eliminate all inheritance. She compared marriage to prostitution and said that unpaid housework “is the definition of women’s work, which is shit work.” In speeches, she frequently drew on the theme of her 1978 essay “If Men Could Menstruate.”
She continued to use her voice for social justice into her eighties. At the 2017 Women’s March in Washington, D.C., she rebuked President Donald Trump for his divisive rhetoric. “The Constitution doesn’t begin with, ‘I, the president’,” she said. “It begins with, ‘We, the people.’ So don’t try to divide us!” Later she blasted Trump’s proposal to force Muslims to register in a government database. “If you force Muslims to register, we will all register as Muslims,” Steinem declared. In 2018, she raised money for Planned Parenthood and joined a successful effort to save the last abortion clinic in her hometown of Toledo.
Steinem’s work was not limited to the United States. She was an outspoken advocate for peace and human rights around the world. In 1984 she and two other activists were arrested at the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C. for protesting the country’s apartheid regime. In 2010, Steinem and Pramila Jayapal (then an immigrant rights activist and since 2017 a congressperson from Seattle) coauthored an article linking women’s and immigrant rights issues. In 2015 Steinem joined a delegation of thirty female peace activists from fifteen countries who made a rare crossing of the dangerous demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.
Despite her many successes, Steinem made some missteps. In 2016, for example, while campaigning for Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primaries, she made a rare political blunder. When asked why so many young women were supporting Bernie Sanders rather than Clinton, she said “When you’re young, you’re thinking, where are the boys?” The backlash to this quip was merciless and she quickly apologized.
Not all of the goals of Steinem’s generation have been achieved, and patriarchy has not disappeared, yet there’s been significant progress. More men take responsibility for housework and childcare, although it is still not shared equally. The U.S. gender pay gap has narrowed: According to the Pew Research Center, women’s pay has increased from roughly 65 percent in 1982 to 85 percent by 2024. Among married female-male couples, women’s financial contributions have grown steadily over the last half century. The share of women who earn as much or more than their husband has roughly tripled from 16 percent to 45 percent since the early 1970s.
Another area of progress is women’s participation in sports. Students in my college courses, including most women, are shocked to see charts showing that in 1971, the year before Congress passed Title IX, only 300,000 girls (less than 4 percent) participated in high school sports. Today, 3.6 million (43 percent) do. The number of women playing college sports has also mushroomed. These trends have laid the groundwork for the growing popularity of women’s professional sports, including soccer, tennis, and basketball. This summer witnessed the inaugural season of the Women’s Professional Baseball League, the first since the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (the inspiration for the 1992 film A League of Their Own), which lasted from 1943 to 1954.
Feminism has also helped break the professional glass ceiling. Watching the documentary RBG, my students are stunned to learn that when Ruth Bader Ginsburg enrolled at Harvard Law School in 1956, she was one of only nine women in a class of 500. As recently as 1971, women constituted only 3 percent of American lawyers. Today, women represent about 56 percent of all law students. The proportion of women among college students has also increased from 42 percent in 1970 to 57 percent in 2025.
Women have made significant advancements in politics. In 1969, only half of all Americans said they would vote for a woman for president. By 1999, according to a Gallup poll, 92 percent of Americans supported the idea. At the start of the women’s liberation movement, no woman had ever been the presidential nominee of one of the two major political parties. That is no longer the case. The idea of a woman president is no longer a distant dream. In 1969. there were only ten women in the House of Representatives and one in the Senate. In the current Congress, 125 women (29 percent) serve in the House and twenty-six (26 percent) in the Senate, the highest total figure in history. Nor is this only a phenomenon at the federal level: 28 percent of the nation’s governors are women, up from only two in 1980. Roughly 34 percent of state representatives are women. and forty-one of the one hundred largest cities have women mayors.
College students today take for granted that they can take courses in women’s history, literature, and other subjects, but the first women's studies courses didn’t appear until 1969, when Cornell University offered a class in response to student demands. By 1975, that number exploded to over 1,000 courses at hundreds of colleges and universities. Now they are a staple on almost every campus, despite the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine them as part of its assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Women’s and gender studies departments employ over 2,000 full- and part-time faculty members.
To Steinem’s generation of feminists, these statistics are a sign of progress. Subsequent generations, however, are more likely to see in them a sign of how far we have to go before women achieve equity in many areas of American life. A YouGov poll conducted in July and August found that nearly half of Americans (46 percent)—including 54 percent of women and 36 percent of men—say the country has not gone far enough in promoting gender equality, compared with 17 percent who think it has gone too far. While there is still far to go, Steinem’s life and legacy provide valuable lessons about overcoming obstacles and challenging the status quo.
Steinem’s feminism was rooted in a critique of capitalism and big business, which pitted women against men for jobs, pay, promotion, rights, and respect. She frequently spoke at gatherings of 9 to 5, the working women’s group, and certainly agreed with Dolly Parton’s song, “9 to 5,” that “It’s a rich man’s game no matter what they call it. And you spend your life puttin’ money in his wallet.”
She was also an early advocate of what today’s activists call intersectionality—consistently injecting issues of race and class into the women’s movement. “The truth was (and still is) that in the United States, as in almost every country, categories of work are less likely to be paid by the expertise they require—or even by importance to the community or to the often mythical free market—than by the sex, race and class of most of their workers,” she wrote in a 1994 essay “Revaluing Economics.” She pushed other white middle-class feminists to embrace the concerns of working-class women and women of color. In a 2017 interview with The Grio, she praised Black Lives Matter activists for creating “a more inclusive movement.”
Steinem always viewed working- and middle-class men as potential allies in the struggle for equality. She built bridges between feminism’s radical and liberal wings and between the women’s and labor movements. She believed that unions were a vehicle for promoting gender parity and often join their picket lines. She was not only a cofounder of the Coalition of Labor Union Women, but also an honorary co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America in the 1980s and 1990s, long before it mushroomed into today’s influential force in American politics.
Steinem believed that the struggle for equality was ongoing and that activists could never give up the fight. There has been backsliding on abortion rights since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending the federal constitutional right to an abortion. Some evangelical ministers in the MAGA orbit want to repeal women’s suffrage. We’ve also seen the rise of a “manosphere” culture epitomized by Joe Rogan, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and others in Trump world. It may be having an influence: A 2018 survey of boys in the eighth and tenth grades found that 84 percent believed that women and men should have the same job opportunities. By 2023, that figure had slipped to 72 percent.
But these gender reactionaries are fighting a rearguard battle. We all stand on the shoulders of earlier generations of reformers, radicals, and idealists, like Steinem, who challenged the status quo of their day and transformed radical ideas into common sense. Those who don’t know this history have little understanding of how far we have come, how we got here, and what still needs to change to make America more livable, humane, democratic, and inclusive. Steinem’s 1970 prediction “If Women’s Lib wins, perhaps we all do” is not yet a reality. But many Americans, including a majority of those under fifty, now embrace the once-radical tenets of modern feminism. And that, like Steinem’s life, is a victory worth celebrating.
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Union Report Warns Electronic Shelf Labels Could Kill Jobs and Crush Wages
Some states are cracking down on "surveillance pricing." But a report out from the AFL-CIO suggests that the risk of electronic shelf labels are much broader than just price gouging.
Sep 09, 2026
Lawmakers are already raising concerns that electronic shelf labels could be used by grocery chains to jack up prices on shoppers. But the technology could also be used to shrink paychecks and kill jobs, according to a report out Wednesday from the research arm of the AFL-CIO.
The new report examines marketing materials used by electronic shelf label (ESL) companies to sell their products to grocery chains. It finds that they are often billed as a tool allowing retailers to save on labor costs, automate work, and reduce hours for real employees.
"Grocery giants like to claim that electronic shelf labels will free up workers to serve customers directly, but this report shows this is not the case," said Ademola Oyefeso, the international vice president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), which represents over 800,000 grocery industry employees. "Using studies and marketing material from the manufacturers pushing the technology, we know ESLs could actually cost workers and their families billions of dollars in lost income."
The AFL-CIO Tech Institute, which conducted the report, examined studies from two ESL manufacturers, Pricer and Vusion Group, that examined how their systems were used at specific stores.
The 2022 study by Pricer found that by automating price changes, its system saved one store about 5,200 worker hours annually. Vusion, meanwhile, found in 2024 that its technology saved about 600 hours of work over about six months, or 1,200 annually.
Using data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the AFL-CIO projected that at these rates, were the technology to be adopted at all of the nearly 60,000 grocery stores in the US, it would reduce the number of worker hours annually by anywhere from 71 million to 308 million.
Using hourly wage data, they found that this translated to the loss of between $1.61 billion-$6.97 billion in annual wages and between 44,000-192,000 full-time jobs. That's anywhere from $608 to $2,633 per employee.
The issue of using ESLs to gouge customers has already become an area of focus for lawmakers in Congress. Earlier this year, Democrats in the US House and Senate introduced legislation to prohibit "surveillance pricing," which involves targeting individual shoppers with increased prices by analyzing their personal data.
Surveillance pricing has been used in e-commerce to fluctuate prices for individual consumers of everything from grocery delivery to airline tickets. But as facial recognition and other surveillance technologies grow more powerful, fears have grown that ESLs could be used to bring surveillance practices into the physical realm.
“Through our analysis, we found that the implementation of electronic shelf labels are likely going to drive prices even higher. The reason being that these labels are connected to the same algorithmic pricing software that online retailers are already using,” said Sunny Glottmann, the policy and programs manager at the AFL-CIO Tech Institute and co-author of the report.
"Electronic shelf labels create the infrastructure that would make rapid algorithmic price changes easier to implement at scale, and this raises concerns for consumers that are already struggling with grocery costs," Glottmann said.
At least three states—Connecticut, Maryland, and New Jersey—have banned some forms of surveillance pricing, and other states are also considering a ban.
Unions like the AFL-CIO and UFCW say that legislating only against surveillance pricing is much too narrow, encompassing only a small segment of the dangers posed by ESLs.
"Policymakers should ban ESLs outright, rather than rely on narrower disclosure or dynamic-pricing laws that leave the underlying technology in place," the AFL-CIO report says, noting New Jersey's one-year moratorium on the technology as a good starting place.
"When grocery store workers lose income, that means less money to spend at other stores and businesses in the community," Oyefeso said. "Banning this technology should be a top priority for lawmakers at every level, like New Jersey has done with a moratorium on ESLs and a ban on predatory pricing practices outright. More states should follow suit to protect both shoppers and workers.”
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On Labor Day, Mamdani Announces First-of-Its-Kind 'Office of Worker Power' in NYC
"We’re setting it up to help workers organize in an economy where more and more is stacked against them."
Sep 07, 2026
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani marked Labor Day on Monday by announcing a new Office of Worker Power, an initiative aimed at bolstering union organizing at a time when wage growth is being swallowed by inflation and corporations are fighting as aggressively as ever to prevent employees from wielding their collective strength.
"This is a first-of-its-kind office in the country, and we’re setting it up to help workers organize in an economy where more and more is stacked against them," Mamdani said of the new project, which will "utilize city government to help workers organize themselves and build power to improve their working conditions and their lives."
"We created the first-in-the-nation Office of Worker Power to put the full weight of City Hall behind the people who keep New York running," said Mamdani. "The nurse working a double shift. The teacher working a second job. The warehouse workers organizing for a union. Every New Yorker working hard to build a life and support a family. On Labor Day, we honor the workers who came before us by fighting for the workers who come next."
Julie Su, the former acting US Labor Secretary who now serves as New York City's deputy mayor for economic justice, will oversee the new office, which will be led by longtime union organizer Tony Perlstein.
"When workers can organize, everything changes," said Su. "When they can build lasting, durable power, power that lets them transform their work experience, and by extension their lives, everything changes."
The office's website, debuted amid the Trump administration's assault on labor unions at the national level, includes a "get help" section that contains information on how workers interested in organizing can contact city officials, who will "share what you need to know and connect you with organizations that support workers like you."
"Someone might come to this office because they’re a worker and they want to better their own conditions, or the conditions of those around them, and they’re not sure where to go next," Mamdani told Jacobin in an interview. "In New York City, it’s very hard to know who you should call about any of these issues. Now we’re saying you will soon be able to go to nyc.gov/workerpower and finally get the kind of information you need, so that you know what rights you already have available to you and what rights you can win."
BREAKING: Mayor Zohran Mamdani announces a first-of-its-kind office focused on organizing workers in New York City.
The Mayor’s Office of Worker Power will provide workers with resources needed to organize their workplaces, hold public hearings on major worker issues, and more. pic.twitter.com/tkOg3s3fpn
— Jacobin (@jacobin) September 7, 2026
A recent report by the City University of New York School of Labor and Urban Studies found that "while union density remains strong in New York, membership rates remain largely unchanged, despite renewed organizing, successful strikes, and strong public support for labor."
"Union density stands at 20.5% in New York City and 20.9% statewide, more than double the national rate of 10%, yet well below levels recorded two decades ago," the report notes.
Perlstein, the leader of the new Office of Worker Power who previously served as an organizing director at the United Auto Workers, told reporters that "there is a huge gap between what workers want and what workers have." Perlstein pointed to a recent Gallup survey showing that more than 70% of Americans approve of labor unions—a figure far higher than the unionization rate.
“We’re going to be looking to provide opportunities to working-class New Yorkers to get educated on their rights to form unions and what it means to build power,” said Perlstein. “We’re going to work to connect workers to organizations that can help them build that power.”
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Who's Afraid of Diverse Histories?
Instead of warning Americans away, we should safeguard exhibits, lesson plans, and art that tell diverse histories. They help us understand our country better.
Aug 30, 2026
In a recent, high-profile dispute, the president castigated the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for failing to “present American history as a shared national inheritance to be taught and celebrated.” His showdown with its director, Anthea Hartig, followed a contentious House subcommittee hearing at which Republicans openly chastised her for similar reasons. The White House has now directed that the National Park Service install signage outside the building warning visitors of alleged inaccuracies within.
Many of the museum’s current exhibits commemorate the country’s diverse histories in honor of the American semiquincentennial. The president is wrong that these displays pander and divide. Rather, they educate Americans on often overlooked events in our own country.
Take my wheelhouse, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) history. It gets the Smithsonian treatment in an exhibit canvassing Filipino American history from the 1910s to the 1970s. In fact, Asian Americans have been here since before the Declaration of Independence—from the crew of a Spanish expedition in 1587 to a mid-1700s settlement in the swamplands near New Orleans. I bet your school textbooks never taught that.
A robust American education requires that we preserve more of these stories: in museums, in the classroom, and in broader popular culture. To our credit, we are beginning to do so. Five years ago, Illinois passed the first state-level mandate to teach AAPI history in classrooms. Since then, local pilot programs and legislation in 23 states have expanded AAPI history in K-12 social-studies curricula. These efforts have accompanied moves in many school districts to teach diverse content, including Black, women’s, and LGBTQ+ histories.
Whatever one’s political leanings, having more information about our shared past allows us to draw more educated conclusions about our present.
Still, 55% of Americans cannot name a single event or policy related to Asian Americans. That means more than lacking familiarity with a racial group. Without knowing the past, and how diverse communities influenced it, we cannot fully understand many of today’s legal institutions and enforcement activities.
For example, immigration enforcement at our Southern border first became a priority during the era of Chinese Exclusion. To skirt detention at Angel Island, new arrivals from China increasingly entered the country via Mexico. Around 1904, mounted federal agents began patrolling the border in response. Over time, their duties expanded from immigration to general law enforcement. In conjunction with the Texas Rangers, they engaged in confrontations, sometimes fatal, with Tejanos and others accused of smuggling illicit goods.
The border, it hardly requires pointing out, haunts national politics still, with mass detention, visas, and the status of sanctuary cities dominating the news cycle. The construction of a physical border wall, meanwhile, threatens to disrupt our relations with Native American tribes and jeopardize our national parks.
Other links between past and present abound. For example, many contemporary labor movements share DNA with those that AAPI workers led. The American History Museum’s exhibit on Filipino Americans explores the decades-long organizing work of Larry Itliong, which culminated in his leadership of the 1965 Delano grape strike alongside Cesar Chavez. The latter is a household name, and the former should be.
Similarly, the movie Sinners brought attention to the role of Chinese American grocers in the Mississippi Delta during Jim Crow. They played complex roles in their local communities, testing and fortifying racial hierarchies in turn. They sold goods to Black patrons on credit, breaking the dominance of extractive plantation commissaries. But they also brought legal challenges that reinforced the premise of “separate but equal,” such as a suit in which they argued for their children’s admission into white schools while accepting the need for separate Black schools. How Chinese American families lived in and navigated the political climate of the postbellum South sheds light on little-known facets of the region’s economy and institutions.
I learned about all these events as an adult, reading texts on my own (such as Erika Lee’s The Making of Asian America). And far from diminishing my patriotism, as the president apparently fears, each of these stories has strengthened my belief in the resilience of all Americans—and in the idea that America itself is a collective project.
Instead of warning Americans away, we should safeguard exhibits, lesson plans, and art that tell diverse histories. They help us understand our country better. Whatever one’s political leanings, having more information about our shared past allows us to draw more educated conclusions about our present. Democracies rely on informed citizens. And the way to build an informed citizenry is to treat diverse histories as a vital part of our national inheritance.
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How DSA and Democrats Can Win the Working Class (and How Not To)
If both DSA and the Democratic Party want to be of and not just for the working class, broadly defined, they have a long way to go. But the work is vital.
Aug 28, 2026
The Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America share a problem. As organizations largely run by and involved with college-educated voters, they are physically and psychically removed from working people without four-year degrees. Both the Democrats and DSA claim they are speaking for the working class, but they are not, at present, political organizations of the working class.
The Democrats have tried to avoid their working-class problem by embracing suburban Republicans and independents who have been repulsed by the GOP’s extremism. The Democrats’ embrace of Wall Street and Hollywood big money—and NAFTA—has pushed working people out of the coalition.
For DSA, on the other hand, the easiest way to address the problem is to define it away. DSA uses a broad definition of the working class that includes underpaid college-educated graduate students, unemployed and underemployed college graduates, and a host of other college-educated workers who suffer from insecure jobs and the high cost of living. While these educated workers are sometimes financially akin to the working class, the majority of working people—nearly 60 percent—do not have four-year college degrees.
And that’s the way the 2024 vote went. Trump had a 14-point advantage among voters without college degrees, while Harris carried college graduates, 56 percent to 43 percent. If DSA and the Democrats remain organizations largely of the highly educated, they will lose.
Racial Silos?
Looking at voters as racial groups is another way to avoid dealing with the working-class issues the Democrats and DSA face.
The Democrats have historically done well with Black and Hispanic voters, and the working class is increasingly multiracial. The idea is that if we stop viewing the working class as dominated by white workers, people of color will lead to stronger vote totals for the Democrats.
Alas, ethnicity is no longer a sure sign of voting Democratic because working-class Black and Hispanic voters have been leaving the party. Twenty percent of Black voters without four-year degrees and 48 percent of Hispanic voters without four-year degrees supported Trump in 2024.
White voters without four-year college degrees made up 42 percent of the 2024 electorate nationally. In seven states where Democrats have largely abandoned the political field—Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho—they constituted a majority of voters, ranging from 51 percent in Kansas to 58 percent in Montana and Idaho.
No significant progressive political movement can succeed without attracting large numbers of working-class voters of all colors. (Please see my latest book for the development of this argument.)
The Fox News Strategy?
Perhaps a good way to reach the working class is through conservative media. Some in DSA believe that their base can be extended by appearing on Fox News and making their case.
According to Pew Research, the median age of Fox viewers is 55, and most are Republicans or Republican-leaning independents. Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has been making Fox News appearances lately that have drawn attention, but it’s not at all clear that Fox News reaches deeply into younger working-class communities, especially those independents who are open to progressive economic populism. A good case could be made that progressives are wasting their time on conservative media, though El-Sayed’s performance this November could change my mind.
Electoral Canvassing?
DSA has done a remarkable job of fielding large numbers of door knockers during its political campaigns. The one-on-one conversations that take place are key to getting out the vote and sharing information about progressive policies such as taxing billionaires and Medicare for All. When thousands of DSA activists hit the streets during an election, public education certainly takes place.
But where and with whom?
Most DSA canvassing to date takes place in blue districts. And within those districts, it’s not clear whether working-class areas have been targeted. Often in political campaigns, the goal of canvassing is to find those voters most likely to support your candidate and make sure they vote. Harvesting the most likely supporters usually means targeting the areas where they live. Since DSA candidates thrive among college-educated voters, there is likely to be a tendency to concentrate canvassing in gentrified and upper-middle-class areas. Working-class urban areas will also be reached, but the balance is likely to tilt toward where the most likely supporters live.
More importantly, to date, most of the canvassing has taken place in urban areas and in and around college towns. Maybe I’m missing something, but reaching deeply into red working-class communities has not yet become a significant part of DSA’s ground game.
Long-Term Engagement with Working-Class Union People?
Unless and until DSA—and the Democrats, for that matter—set up precinct-level organizations in working-class neighborhoods, electioneering will be episodic and superficial. Door-to-door conversations are worthwhile, but they are no substitute for continual engagement within local organizations.
In my opinion, the best way to reach the working class is to engage with people through their labor organizations. The labor movement is much smaller than it was a generation ago, but there are still thousands of union meetings taking place each month, ranging from small local union gatherings to larger regional and national conferences. Political activists need to show up and listen to what union members care about.
It takes work, often hard work, to get in the door. That’s something the Labor Institute, which I cofounded, had to do a half century ago when we started our work. To get educational opportunities, we reached out to countless labor leaders and activists, gradually gaining their trust and finding venues to show our wares.
It takes lots of time and lots of trust-building, but the conversations that emerge through ongoing educational engagement taught us as much as we taught others, greatly enriching what we were able to offer. DSA would broaden its support and deepen its connections with working people if it engaged with large numbers of blue-collar and service workers in trade unions.
If DSA wants to be of and not just for the working class, broadly defined, it will have to get in the labor door. It will need to learn how to have a dialogue with working-class groups who might be progressive populists but are also likely to have concerns about socialism and whether DSA really can advance the cause of non-college-educated working people.
DSA, more than the Democrats, has the troops and the energy to do that work. The jury is out, however, on whether it can deploy that passion, and commitment to engage with working people who don’t already agree with them.
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12,000 Starbucks Workers Call for Boycott of Law-Breaking Coffee Chain
"We know when working people stand up together, we win."
Aug 25, 2026
Starbucks workers who have joined the unionizing effort that started in Buffalo, New York in 2021 and has spread to over 700 stores across the country called on all working people to show solidarity by boycotting the coffee chain, which has refused to finalize a union contract and has been accused of hundreds of labor violations.
"What we’re fighting for is simple: a minimum $17 per hour wage, enough hours to live on, better staffing in our stores, and basic workplace protections," said Starbucks Workers United (SWU) Tuesday. "Every year, our living costs rise, but our wages don’t keep up—a growing pressure many American workers are feeling as corporate greed accelerates unchecked in our country."
While the company "fuels working people" across the country every day, said the union, "it's failing the workers who fuel its profits"—which rose to $25.5 billion in 2025.
Starbucks and the union returned to the bargaining table in April after a monthslong nationwide strike, with about 4,500 baristas reportedly picketing at 230 stores in more than 130 cities at the peak of the work stoppage.
SWU was originally calling for a minimum wage of $20 per hour. Baristas in 43 states make $16 per hour and under as a starting wage. The union is calling for 4% annual raises, arguing that inflation has eaten into any benefit provided by small annual raises.
The workers are also calling for a minimum of three staff members in stores at all times.
"The company is notorious for hiring additional workers while current workers are asking for more hours to survive. The union is demanding more hours for existing employees before new hires," reported Labor Notes in April.
The union noted that the National Labor Relations Board and its judges "have found that Starbucks committed hundreds of labor violations and there are currently more than 550 unresolved unfair labor practice charges still pending against the company."
The company has fired workers for organizing, illegally withheld wages and benefits, and illegally surveilled employees.
The call for a boycott coincided with the yearly release of Starbucks' fall menu, including its popular pumpkin spice latte, which generated $2 billion for the company in its first decade.
"Starbucks has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of care for the workers who fuel the company’s profits by wasting millions of dollars on AI and technology that doesn’t work, launching countless gimmicky drinks designed to distract from real problems, and inventing pointless policies that do nothing but make our jobs harder," said SWU.
"This ongoing, irrational behavior by Starbucks and its refusal to settle a fair union contract with workers leaves us with no other choice than to call for a boycott," added the union. "We know when working people stand up together, we win."
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Mamdani Backs Proposal to End Amazon's 'Exploitative' Delivery Model in New York City
If passed, the Delivery Protection Act would be the first law in the US to regulate Amazon's vast network of subcontractors that handle the company's deliveries.
Aug 11, 2026
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has thrown his support behind legislation that could become a first-in-the-nation law to regulate Amazon's network of subcontractors that deliver the $3 trillion company's packages—an "exploitative business model" that shields the e-commerce giant from accountability, as Mamdani said Monday.
The Democratic mayor endorsed the Delivery Protection Act, proposed by New York City Council Member Tiffany Cabán, which would establish new safety, training, and labor standards for "last-mile" warehouses and distribution facilities in New York City, and hold the companies that operate the facilities, such as Amazon and FedEx, liable for employing the workers who make hundreds of deliveries per day across the city.
As the mayor's office said Monday, at least 11 last-mile facilities have opened across New York City since 2020, with subcontractors running the warehouses as Amazon directs the hiring of delivery drivers, the routes they use, and requires them to use Amazon-branded vehicles and uniforms.
But while exerting control over the deliveries, Amazon pushes responsibility for the vehicles used onto the subcontractors, as delivery workers explained in a video released on social media by Mamdani on Monday.
"When injuries and worker accidents skyrocket, Amazon says they have nothing to do with it. They can't have it both ways," said the workers.
If it looks like an Amazon delivery and drives like an Amazon delivery, then it's an Amazon delivery, right? Not according to Amazon.
Big companies like Amazon have built a vast network of subcontractors who deliver their packages while shielding them from accountability.
It… pic.twitter.com/6hQVV8GoNH
— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) August 10, 2026
According to a report by the Office of the Comptroller in New York City last year, 78% of areas surrounding last-mile facilities saw an increase in injury-causing crashes after the warehouses opened.
“Corporations like Amazon build billion-dollar business models by insulating themselves from accountability through a system of exploitative subcontracting," said Mamdani in a statement. "As last-mile delivery centers have exploded across New York, so too have traffic accidents and worker injuries. The Delivery Protection Act is commonsense regulation that protects delivery workers, safeguards the communities where these facilities operate, and ensures that the corporations benefiting from workers’ labor are responsible for the consequences of their business practices."
"The people who make these companies run deserve dignity, stability, and a safe workplace," he added. "It's time to end the subcontracting model that puts profits over people and build an economy that works for working New Yorkers.”
By using subcontractors, Amazon can avoid municipal regulations regarding minimum pay and benefits. A nationwide survey by the Shift Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy last year found that Amazon delivery drivers are paid an average of $19 per hour, compared with $35 per hour at UPS and $25 per hour at FedEx. Pay does not rise with tenure at Amazon, as opposed to its delivery competitors, and fewer than half of Amazon drivers have access to health insurance, paid vacation, and retirement plans that are provided to nearly all UPS delivery workers.
In New York City, pay for the drivers who make Amazon's deliveries is higher, starting at about $20 per hour and averaging close to $24 per hour. But one driver in Queens, Luc Rene, told The New York Times that Amazon controls the volume of packages he delivers and has refused to allow the subcontractor he works for, DNA Logistics, to lighten the workload during extreme heat and other inclement weather.
The company could not be reached for a comment to the Times, and Amazon did not address Rene's allegations but claimed it adjusts drivers' routes due to inclement weather.
Amazon has claimed that the Delivery Protection Act—which would require last-mile facilities to obtain licenses from the city's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, ensure worker protections, and hold companies accountable for delivery quotas, schedules, and routes—would raise costs for people who use delivery services, with one Amazon-commissioned study claiming households would spend $664 more annually if the company had to comply with the law.
But Brendan Griffith, president of the New York City Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO, said the workers and communities in New York City are already "paying the price" for Amazon's reliance on subcontractors.
“The Delivery Protection Act will establish stronger protections for worker safety, employment, and responsible operations while bringing long-overdue oversight to an industry where major operators have too often hidden behind subcontractors," said Griffith. "To be clear: when these companies 'raise the alarm' of fewer jobs, higher prices, or service reductions, they are describing choices that they may make, not in the best interest of consumers and workers but to protect their bottom line. We thank Mayor Mamdani for standing with the Amazon Teamsters and the labor movement in support of this legislation that puts NYC workers—who are also consumers—first, and we urge the City Council to pass it without delay.”
Mamdani's advocacy for the legislation in New York City caught the attention of at least one lawmaker across the country.
"We should pass something like this in Colorado," said state Rep. Javier Mabrey (D-1).
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'No Vacation Nation': Analysis Shows US Workers Getting Shafted When It Comes to Paid Time Off
The US is still the only developed country that doesn't require any paid vacation time by law.
Aug 05, 2026
Though they may work in the land of the free, Americans are getting a lot less free time than their counterparts around the world.
The US is the only developed nation that doesn't require employers to grant workers any paid vacation time. And according to a report out Wednesday, the average American is receiving less time off than what many of their peers consider the bare minimum.
Twenty-five countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) require employers to grant at least 20 days of paid time off to their workers.
Workers in the UK are guaranteed at least 28 days of lounging each year by law, while those in Sweden, France, Denmark, and Austria get a minimum of 25 days off.
Americans, meanwhile, are receiving just 10 vacation days per year on average, according to the analysis, titled "No Vacation Nation," by John Schmitt, a fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
That is the bare minimum for countries ranking at the bottom of the OECD list, Japan and Canada, which each require full-time workers to get at least 10 days off.
And the Americans getting time off at all are the lucky ones. Around 43% of workers in the bottom quarter of earners don't get any paid vacation time, while just 38% of part-time workers do.
“Every other comparable country in the world guarantees workers a decent minimum amount of paid vacation. In the United States, we don’t require employers to give any,” Schmitt said. “As a result, almost a quarter of our workforce has nothing at all, and the average for those workers who do have paid vacation is near the bottom of the minimum required by law in the rest of the world’s rich countries.”
Vacation days are just one of many areas where American workers are guaranteed less than their counterparts in other wealthy nations. The US is also the only OECD country with no national requirement for paid maternity leave or sick leave.
Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus have pushed for paid time off to be included in its "New Affordability Agenda," a package of bills focused on labor and the cost of living that they hope will pass if Democrats retake Congress this November.
They've included a bill introduced last year by Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI) which requires two weeks of paid vacation for full-time workers.
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Amid Deadly Temperatures, GOP Advances Bill to Ban Federal Heat Protections for Workers
"Congress should not respond to an escalating occupational hazard by permanently removing the Department of Labor’s authority to address it."
Jul 24, 2026
A Republican-controlled House committee passed legislation earlier this week that would prevent the US Labor Department from enacting federal standards to protect workers from extreme heat, a move that came amid sweltering heat across the country.
The Heat Workforce Standards Act, led by Rep. Mark Messmer (R-Ind.), passed the House Education and Workforce Committee on Tuesday in a 18-15 vote along party lines. If enacted, the legislation would bar the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) from implementing nationwide heat protections for workers—including those proposed by the Biden administration in 2024.
The Biden Labor Department estimated that its proposed rules would protect around 36 million workers. Trump's Labor Department has done nothing to move forward with the Biden-era proposal.
The AFL-CIO, the largest labor federation in the US, has condemned the GOP bill, noting that "extreme heat is one of the deadliest workplace hazards in America."
"House lawmakers are considering legislation that would block OSHA from issuing or enforcing a federal heat safety standard," the labor group said earlier this week. "That's the wrong direction when workers' lives are on the line."
Ahead of Tuesday's vote, a coalition of labor unions and advocacy groups wrote in a letter to members of Congress that the Republican legislation "would permanently remove the federal government’s authority to address a workplace hazard that is already resulting in worker fatalities."
"The Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded 55 worker deaths from heat exposure in 2023, a number that safety researchers widely consider to be an undercount due to frequent misclassification or underreporting of heat-related illnesses and fatalities," the coalition wrote. "More broadly, heat-related deaths in the United States have more than doubled since 1999, and extreme heat now claims more lives each year than any other weather-related hazard."
"Workers have no control over extreme heat, and many are unable to refuse hazardous assignments without jeopardizing their livelihoods," the groups added. "Congress should not respond to an escalating occupational hazard by permanently removing the Department of Labor’s authority to address it."
The Groundwork Collaborative, Workshop, and Harvard Law School’s Center for Labor and a Just Economy estimated in a report published earlier this year that basic, federal workplace heat protections could save up to 1,500 lives annually. The report observed that major industry groups, including the US Chamber of Commerce, have mobilized against proposed national heat protections.
"Companies like Amazon and the United Parcel Service (UPS) that employ hundreds of thousands of workers subjected to extreme workplace temperatures make public statements about their commitments to worker safety while actively lobbying to weaken or block heat regulations," the report noted. "As extreme heat intensifies, the cost of inaction will be measured in lives lost. The question facing policymakers is no longer whether effective protections exist, but whether they have the political will to stand up to those unscrupulous employers lobbying hard to block them."
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United Auto Workers Leader Shawn Fain Vows to 'Fight Back Hard' Against Trump DOJ Probe
"This is what happens when you go against corporate America and their allies," said the United Auto Workers president.
Jul 13, 2026
United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain issued a fiery statement on Sunday vowing to "fight back hard" as President Donald Trump's Justice Department launched a probe into allegations that the union leader abused his authority to seek benefits for his fiancée and her sister.
Fain rejected the claims as "false" and accused UAW vice president Rich Boyer, who is vying for the union presidency, of "trying to weaponize these bogus allegations to steal the upcoming UAW election." Fain also hit out at court-appointed federal monitor Neil Barofsky, whom the union president accused of harboring "a political grudge against me because the UAW took an anti-war stance about what was happening in Gaza."
"Rich Boyer has fed the monitor false allegations about me," said Fain. "We're going to fight back hard."
In 2023, Fain emerged as one of the most prominent union leaders in the nation during the UAW's weeks-long "Stand Up Strike" against the Big Three automakers, which yielded historic contracts for UAW members. On Sunday, Fain suggested that the union's successes under his leadership are fueling his opponents' attacks.
"This is what happens when you go against corporate America and their allies," said Fain, "and I'm not going to be intimidated or harassed out of serving our membership."
Bloomberg reported Sunday that the US Justice Department has launched a grand jury probe into allegations that Fain "sought a financial bonus for his fiancée and pushed for a worker’s compensation claim for her sister."
"He allegedly retaliated against Boyer for refusing to approve the benefits by stripping the official of his duties as chief negotiator with Stellantis NV, the maker of Jeep and Ram vehicles," Bloomberg noted. "The allegations became public last month in a report by the court-appointed monitor."
Fain on Sunday denied retaliating against Boyer. "The truth when it comes to Boyer," Fain said, "is that I didn't want him running the Stellantis Department because he wasn't doing a good job for our members."
The UAW president went on to accuse Boyer of trying to "hire family members into UAW positions" and failing to enforce the union's contract with Stellantis.
"Boyer is bad for our union and I'm not going to let him use the monitor's bogus investigation so he can try to fail upwards into a bigger title," said Fain. "Our election is in six weeks. Neil Barofsky will not run our union, no matter how hard he tries. And no company sellout like Boyer is going to dictate our elections."
Barofsky was appointed as UAW monitor in 2021—around two years before Fain was sworn in as union president—as part of a consent decree with the Justice Department in the wake of a corruption investigation.
Relations between Fain and Barofsky have reportedly been strained since late 2023, when the UAW became the largest union in the US to call for a ceasefire in Gaza as the Palestinian enclave faced a massive Israeli assault.
Shortly after the UAW's demand, according to The Detroit News, Barofsky "called Fain for a personal conversation related to the ceasefire statement and other issues around the war—a call Fain would later indicate made him uncomfortable, and that a union lawyer told Barofsky was out of line."
In February 2024, weeks after the UAW's ceasefire call, Fain and Barofsky had an "expletive-laden discussion" that Fain says "led to the monitor launching an investigation into him," The Detroit News reported last week. Fain reportedly said at one point during the February phone meeting that Barofsky accused the union leader of being antisemitic, which Fain furiously denied.
"For anybody to ever f------ say I'm antisemitic, brother, I'll fight your ass in front of this building in a heartbeat," Fain said, according to The Detroit News. "I do not f------ like that, and I don't appreciate it."
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