Dear Progressive Reader,

“The Cause of Labour is The Hope of the World” is the title of a piece of music written by the late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson for the 2010 documentary film The Miners’ Hymns. The film tells the story of mining communities in northern England faced with the destruction of their way of life following the bitter labor struggles of 1984 (a strike that was also movingly documented on cassette tape by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger with songs and audio interviews).  Jóhannsson's song title also reflects the long history of the efforts by working people to make the world a better place, not just for themselves, but for all peoples, with equality and justice.

The British miner’s strike took place almost exactly one hundred years after the first May Day demonstration in Chicago, Illinois, when 60,000 working people speaking more than a dozen different languages joined together to march for the eight-hour-day. May Day is celebrated today as a workers’ holiday around the world, although it is little acknowledged in its country of origin. But in an era of COVID-19, a new rise in worker organizing is being seen around the United States. As Sarah Jaffe wrote in 2020, “Workers around the country are already making demands for the common good. . . . If those workers can come together to push for things like more funding for schools and hospitals, and safety equipment for postal workers and warehouse workers, their demands can expand even more.”

Over the past decade-and-a-half, a growing consciousness about the shared interests of white workers and workers of color has also brought new power and depth to the efforts to organize those workers that have been previously unorganized and often deemed by union leadership as “unorganizable.” The nationwide marches and rallies by Latinx workers that took off beginning with May Day 2006, have continued to spread and grow and become integrated into other organizing work. As a part of her “Interviews for Resistance” series, Jaffe spoke with organizers of the “Day Without Latinxs and Immigrants” events in 2017 and 2018. These large marches took on issues of anti-immigrant rhetoric, restrictions on access to drivers’ licenses, and other broad community issues—in many ways echoing the 1886 multi-ethnic labor demonstration in Chicago that called for “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will.”

In her new book, Fight Like Hell, labor journalist Kim Kelly looks at the long history of labor organizing through the stories of many organizers and activists you may not have heard about. She tells the stories of immigrants, people of color, and other everyday folks, many of them women, who rose to the task of organizing their fellow workers and taking on the exploitation of capitalist bosses and unfeeling corporations. This week, for our website, Zach D. Roberts interviews Kelly. The book, Kelly tells him, is “a marginalized people’s history of labor in the United States. It focuses specifically on the stories and the struggles of people who’ve been left out of this idea of the American dream and pushed to the margins of labor history, and history in general. . . . I tried to write a book about all the people that I was curious about.” The book is also reviewed by Emilio Leanza in the latest print edition of The Progressive magazine.

Also this week, Ed Rampell reviews the re-released version of the 1979 documentary film The Wobblies, which tells the story of the Industrial Workers of the World. Plus, Abe Asher reports on a community museum and other historic sites that showcase the history of the Black Panther Party. Paul Von Blum remembers the life and legacy of political muralist Noni Olalbisi, who passed away last month in Los Angeles. And Randy Jurado Ertll looks at what we have, and have not, learned in the thirty years since the Los Angeles uprising following the 1992 verdict in the beating of Rodney King.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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