Retirement
fromSilicon Canals
2 hours agoWhat no one tells you about a working-class retirement - Silicon Canals
Retirement can lead to unexpected physical and identity challenges for those who defined themselves by their work.
"This company is one of the richest companies in the world, and the wage increases that they're offering simply just don't keep up with the economy and the high cost of living," says Kim Cordova, president of the union that represents JBS workers in Greeley.
"Today's vote ignores the well-documented harmful consequences of wage hikes by economists. Not only would this proposal slash up to 86,000 jobs, it would also worsen inflation for Pennsylvania workers and residents."
"Men's time doing housework is about the same as it was in the 1970s, and that's true whether or not the woman earns more money or the man earns more money."
Zack Polanski has kicked off a charm offensive designed to convince trade unions to stop funding Labour and throw their weight behind the Green party, as he delivered the first in a series of speeches to union conferences.
Within the workplace, the content and conditions of work are largely controlled by employers who often have an interest in degrading the quality of work, both to increase productivity and to increase their control over employees in the workplace. Outside the workplace, employers have both an incentive and the power to undermine measures that would improve the quality of work through the political process.
It's my responsibility to protect them, and so I've been patrolling the city streets following armed, masked thugs trying to kidnap my neighbors. On July 10, Caravello was present at the site, and, according to witnesses, he was arrested directly after he attempted to dislodge a tear gas canister from underneath a protester's wheelchair.
The labor of this kind of organizing was invisible and deeply exhausting. In a precarious workplace, where a so-called 'performance review' could amount to job loss, organizing meant building a bridge while standing on it.
Losing staff could be detrimental to the projects we worked on, and there was a growing dissatisfaction with how meetings were run. These mostly one-sided discussions left the quieter half of us feeling pushed aside, like our thoughts didn't matter much. If things stayed this way, I worried the good people on our team would start quitting one by one.
What are scientists, clinicians, and public health practitioners supposed to do in this moment? What use is research when our patients might be deported tomorrow? Why try to stem the tide of outbreaks when the world has fallen apart? This is why: because even in these times, enlarging the scope of human knowledge matters. The search for cures still matters. The fate of individual patients still matters.
Work, in the words of Karl Marx, is a "means of life" in two senses. It is, first of all, an instrument for human life. It is the activity by which we reproduce ourselves from day to day, from year to year, from generation to generation. But work also forms, so to speak, much of the matter of human life, at least for most people in any society with which we are familiar.
Brown was sitting in a Toledo coffee shop, having just finished a roundtable discussion about rising health-care costs. A small group of Ohioans had expressed all manner of concerns about how they would afford their medical bills, co-pays, and prescriptions. This was the kind of event that Brown used to do a lot of before he departed the Senate after losing reelection in 2024.
The language of blue-collar fathers isn't spoken-it's lived. It's written in grease-stained paychecks, in Saturday mornings spent under the sink, in showing up to work sick because the mortgage doesn't care if you have the flu. After forty years in the trades and raising my own kids, I finally decoded what my father and countless men like him were really communicating through their actions.
Recent developments suggest that the labor movement is starting to take a more active and adversarial approach toward AI in the workplace, This was hardly an isolated incident amid the breakneck integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into the workplace. Ominous signs abound, from the news editor at a nonprofit news site who used AI to edit stories and then fired a reporter for raising objections, to Salesforce's cutting 4,000 customer support jobs and shifting to AI agents.
Rudi Batzell offers a material account of how racial hierarchies formed in the United States, framing the history of racism in the labor movement as a question not of biases and prejudice but of access to property and land. Racism is often considered a question of thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. The accused racist will sometimes deploy the tired old defense that he or she "has black friends,"
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said: The way the LGA has conducted pay negotiations has been nothing short of a disgrace. Craft workers who do difficult and highly skilled jobs deserve better than the LGA playing politics with their livelihoods and imposing a poor pay offer without negotiations. They will have Unite's full backing throughout this dispute which is of the LGA's own making.
Last week, hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants faced an uncertain future as the Trump administration fought in federal court to revoke their legal status and deport them. But despite these threats, the largely immigrant union workers at a JBS beef plant in Greeley, Colorado, many of them recent arrivals from Haiti, still voted on Wednesday by an overwhelming margin to strike over poor working conditions in what could become the first sanctioned walkout at a major meatpacking plant in decades.
Donaldson calling on Brits to "go on strike for a week" from 2 to 9 February, the right-wing activist says that "native Brits must always come first." On his website he explains that mending "immigration" is not "anywhere near as complicated as politicians pretend." He is calling on the government to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and to "deport" all illegal immigrants from the UK and those who commit sexual and violent crimes.
A friend recently told me a story that made this reality impossible to ignore. Her elderly parents live near an elementary school not far from the nation's capital. For several years, they had been quietly raising money to provide groceries and basic supplies for families whose children were going hungry. When Republicans suspended SNAP benefits, the need surged overnight. What had been a steady act of care suddenly became an emergency response.
The strike is a response to the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minnesota. In the days since, calls for a nationwide shutdown have spread rapidly across social media, shared by activists, nonprofits, and everyday people urging a halt to economic activity. Celebrities including Pedro Pascal, Edward Norton, and Jamie Lee Curtis have amplified the message to their followers.
When past generations imagined the best version of the future, it was one of leisure. Advertisements, cartoonists, and pulp novelists dared us to dream of a world where the spoils of industrial development were shared with all: robot butlers, transit by pneumatic tube, and more familiar tropes. These developments, it seemed, would make our lives more convenient, more secure, and - dare we say - more abundant.
People gather for National Day of Truth & Freedom at Union Square on January 23, 2026, in New York City. 1199SEIU frontline healthcare workers, faith leaders, students and community members stood in solidarity with Minnesota, after community groups, faith-based organizations, and unions in the state came together to call for an "economic blackout," as part of National Day of Truth & Freedom to stand against corporations profiteering from Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) actions.