Dissent

“Video games, like any creative product, reflect and refract the conditions of their production. Today, what they most resemble is twenty-first-century work.”

“Politics flattens, but the best country music invites us into people’s complex and contradictory lives.”

Gabriel Winant, a professor at the University of Chicago interviews Shantonia Jackson, a certified nursing assistant (CNA) who works at City View Multicare Center, a nursing home that experienced a major COVID-19 outbreak.

“From a solitary cell in Texas, Kwaneta Yatrice Harris writes letters documenting the torturous conditions, despite the risk of retribution.”

“…the working class constitutes 62 percent of the U.S. labor force. I want a prominent media home that reflects our size and heterogeneity. I want stories about wealth as opposed to income inequality and its effect on intergenerational and social mobility. I want stories that aren’t just about our problems, but that are also told by, for, and with us. We are civic participants who matter. I want us to set the terms of debate.”

“In retrospect, it seems obvious that such a smallness of vision could never withstand the largeness of the right. But, for Obama, opposing largeness with smallness was the point.”

American companies increasingly expect employees to do more work for the same pay rate. Companies have helped them cope by providing mindfulness training and time to meditate, but are mindful workers better off, or are they just being groomed to accept their new stressful baseline and poor work-life balance?

After a six-month investigation, Annie Hylton uncovers third-world working conditions and rampant sexual harassment at industrial laundry facilities serving Manhattan hospitals, hotels, and restaurants. Workers — who went without health and safety training — routinely handled linens contaminated by human blood, urine, vomit, and feces. When workers weren’t dealing directly in others’ sh*t, they were forced to endure it. One manager routinely preyed on migrant women workers who had little English and less recourse; women were subject to unwanted touching and lewd suggestions. And after they finally stood up to complain? Retaliation, of course, in the form of reduced hours and more strenuous duties.

The low-paid labor that keeps our most accomplished artists and leaders running on time.

How LA’s Latino immigrant population mobilized for progressive change in the city by building broad-based coalitions for economic and social justice.