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Articles by Lane Windham
The American Prospect
Skip to content Home / Archives for David Weil Posted inWorking in America Uber and Lyft insist it benefits their drivers. In actuality, it benefits Uber and Lyft. Posted inWorking in America An American Prospect symposium Posted inWorking in America The pandemic has compelled the government to extend temporary protections to some independent contractors and gig workers, but they need full and permanent coverage.
Five Things the New BLS Union Membership Statistics Don’t Tell You
Lane Windham February 20, 2026 Starbucks SBWorkers United baristas and supporters rally for a fair union contract outside Starbucks East Coast distribution center on November 19, 2025, in York, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Lisa Lake/Getty Images for Starbucks Workers United) Union membership ticked up last year, with an overall gain of more than 400,000 workers, and a slight increase in the percentage of workers who have a union, to ten percent.
Why Couldn’t John Sweeney’s AFL-CIO Revive US Labor?
When I came to the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) in 1998, not long after John Sweeney was elected president, the enthusiasm and hope around organizing was contagious. I’d spent much of my twenties as a union organizer in the South, talking with working people in their homes and witnessing the tsunami of employer resistance they faced when unionizing. I knew at my core just how hard it was for US workers to organize.
Could Sisyphus Have Tried Harder? Reflections on the Sweeney Administration’s Efforts at Mass Organizing, Thirty Years Later
Could Sisyphus Have Tried Harder? Reflections on the Sweeney Administration’s Efforts at Mass Organizing, Thirty Years Later Published May 28, 2025 When I came to the AFL-CIO in 1998, not long after John Sweeney was elected president, the enthusiasm and hope around organizing was contagious. I’d spent much of my twenties as a union organizer in the South, talking with working people in their homes and witnessing the tsunami of employer resistance they faced when unionizing.
Meeting Labor’s Moment
In my thirty years in the labor movement, I’ve never seen a moment quite like this one. We’re living through a pivotal moment for America’s working class and for the future of U.S. labor, but it’s more than that. This is a major shift in the social and economic order. In order to see the path forward, we have to consider what’s different from the system we’ve operated in for the last 40 years.
Meeting Labor's Moment
In my thirty years in the labor movement, I’ve never seen a moment quite like this one. We’re living through a pivotal moment for America’s working class and for the future of U.S. labor, but it’s more than that. This is a major shift in the social and economic order. In order to see the path forward, we have to consider what’s different from the system we’ve operated in for the last 40 years.
The 1970s Echo in Today's Union Revival: "Pour Myself a Cup of Ambition"
Unions are clearly having a moment. A diverse group of working people are forming labor unions at Starbucks, Amazon, REI, Apple stores, Google Fiber, and more. Women and people of color are often at the helm of this new surge, which echoes another pivotal moment for labor fifty years ago. In the early 1970s, workers sounded a call for rights and respect. People of color and white women had gained new access to the job market following the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
"Pour Myself a Cup of Ambition": The 1970s Echo in Today's Union Revival
Unions are clearly having a moment. A diverse group of working people are forming labor unions at Starbucks, Amazon, REI, Apple stores, Google Fiber, and more. Women and people of color are often at the helm of this new surge, which echoes another pivotal moment for labor fifty years ago. In the early 1970s, workers sounded a call for rights and respect. People of color and white women had gained new access to the job market following the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
"Pour Myself a Cup of Ambition": The 1970s Echo in Today's Union Revival
Unions are clearly having a moment. A diverse group of working people are forming labor unions at Starbucks, Amazon, REI, Apple stores, Google Fiber, and more. Women and people of color are often at the helm of this new surge, which echoes another pivotal moment for labor fifty years ago. In the early 1970s, workers sounded a call for rights and respect. People of color and white women had gained new access to the job market following the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Why There’s More Labor Media Coverage
Why There’s More Labor Media Coverage By Lane Windham, Working-Class Perspectives. March 25, 2022 Why There’s More Labor Media Coverage2022-03-252022-03-25https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/03/20220325-1.jpg200px200px Above Photo: Police used smoke bombs and rubber bullets against free trade agreement protestors in Miami. 2003.
Why Union Membership Statistics Are Stupid
People are fed up at work, and are refusing to go back to business as usual after the pandemic. Thousands are organizing unions, powering the nation’s most dynamic labor upsurge of the last three decades. Workers at Starbucks and Amazon, nurses, graduate employees, truck drivers, nursing home workers, and dispensary “budtenders” are all throwing down with the union. Nearly half of workers say they would form a union tomorrow if given the chance, and young workers are especially eager.
Blue-Collar Babies: Why America’s Working Class Needs Affordable Child Care
In Netflix’s must-see new series, Maid, Alex (Margaret Qualley) flees a violent boyfriend with her two-year-old in tow, only to discover the gordian knot of being an impoverished, unhoused, single mom. Affordable child care is at the knot’s center. Alex must have a pay stub to qualify for subsidized housing, but first she must have child care to earn that paycheck.
Jacob Zumoff on The Red Thread; the Passaic Textile Strike
Jacob Zumoff on The Red Thread; the Passaic Textile Strike by Rosemary Feurer on September 23rd, 2021 The Red Thread by Jacob Zumoff Welcome to Labor Online’s first on-screen interview with an author of a recently published book. We’ll be continuing to do author interviews in written form, but we’ll be experimenting with short introductions through these interviews.
It's not a labor shortage
As we approach Labor Day, America's working people are deep into a protracted general strike. Millions are refusing to go back into low-wage, no-benefits jobs that require they abandon dignity and rights at the workplace door. Their struggle has brewed for 40 years as wages stagnated, benefits vanished and public policy offered working families little reprieve.
Explaining the erosion of private-sector unions: How corporate practices and legal changes have undercut the ability of workers to organize and bargain
Executive Summary An increasing volume of research demonstrates that erosion of worker bargaining power and collective bargaining have led to wage suppression and the deterioration of labor’s share of income. At the same time, bold and robust policy proposals to strengthen workers’ bargaining power have risen to a new level of priority for the center-left.
OPINION: Coronavirus is a disastrous ‘perfect storm’ for working women
By LANE WINDHAM Washington (PAI) – America’s women workers have been living in a straw house perched high on a cliff, and the coronavirus, officially called COVID-19, is the perfect storm. Though research reveals men are more likely to succumb to the virus, women will be disproportionately devastated by its economic impacts. And that’s especially true for women of color. Women have long held the most precarious jobs, made less money, and done the most paid and unpaid caregiving.
Labor Will Win by Championing Everyone
This article is part of our symposium on “The Future of Labor.” It’s in times of great crisis that the world has broken open, and today’s pandemic has created just such a moment for American workers. Their future depends on whether the workers’ movement—both existing and emerging—can compel the forging of a new social compact, building on the public’s new appreciation of its working class and on the surge in worker protests.
The Future of Labor in Post-Pandemic America
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Harold Meyerson: Introduction Ruth Milkman: Can Unions Surge in Post-Pandemic America?
By Harold Meyerson Verified, Ruth Milkman, Nelson Lichtenstein, Mike Elk Verified, David Weil, Lane Windham, Stephen Lerner, Steven Greenhouse
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The American Prospect
Verified
We had a better social safety net. Then we busted unions
Image via Shutterstock. by Lane Windham April 20, 2020 Written by Lane Windham / History News Network April 20, 2020 COVID-19 has taught us all just how frayed our social safety net has become, and how its holes make us all more vulnerable. Up to 35 million may lose access to employer-provided health care before this crisis is over. Our retirement security depends on markets that twist like roller coasters.
We Had a Better Social Safety Net. Then We Busted Unions.
photo by author COVID-19 has taught us all just how frayed our social safety net has become, and how its holes make us all more vulnerable. Up to 35 million may lose access to employer-provided health care before this crisis is over. Our retirement security depends on markets that twist like roller coasters. We are all at risk when some of us don't have paid sick days and must work with scratchy throats because rent is due.
Labor and the Long Seventies
Interview by Chris Brooks Democracy is bad for business. Fearful of what employees would do if they had power in the workplace, corporations have used every strategy conceivable to keep them in line and democracy in check. And yet there was a time, hard as it might be to imagine now, when labor was on the ascendency.
Labor and the Long Seventies
Employers do three things in the 1970s that make it much, much more difficult for workers to organize unions. First, they become so much more willing to bend and break the law. Employers began to figure out what exactly you could say to workers to threaten them and get away with it. They also just started routinely breaking the law. The number of Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) charges, which are filed if an employer breaks federal labor law, doubled in this decade, as did the number of illegal firings.
Organized Labor’s Lost Generations
Who can remember a time when labor wasn’t losing? Every seeming strategic opportunity turns out to be largely a mirage; the legal and economic environment only gets ever worse. In each of the past four decades, observers and organizers have heralded some new turning point—only for membership to keep falling and campaigns to keep failing. Take, for example, the past few years: Organized labor has made a run at a series of high-profile workplaces, the kinds it hasn’t been able to break into before.
#MeToo Solidarity
Local New York City hotel housekeepers wait for the arrival of former International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn to enter Manhattan Supreme Court on June 6, 2011, where he pleaded not guilty to charges that he sexually assaulted a hotel housekeeper in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) This post originally appeared at Working Class Perspectives. Sexual harassment is both a labor and gender justice issue.
Perspective | The media still gets the working class wrong — but not in the way you think.
This will be the first Labor Day since America rediscovered its working class — or, more accurately, one part of its working class. If there was any consensus in the aftermath of last November’s election, it was that elites had lost touch with working people. Yet 10 months later, most commentators still get the working class wrong. We hear a lot from pundits about working-class white men, conjuring images of blue collars, hard hats and simmering resentments expressed through votes for Donald Trump.
Feminism and Labor Are Critical Parts in the Growing Resistance Against Trump and Right-Wing Misogyny
Feminism and Labor Are Critical Parts in the Growing Resistance Against Trump and Right-Wing Misogyny Tightly gripping a “Firefighters for Women’s Rights and Equality� banner at the Women’s March on Washington, a group of women who had once made history as New York City's first female firefighters roared up Independence Avenue.
From Pink Collars to Pink Hats: Working-Class Feminism and the Resistance
Tightly gripping a “Firefighters for Women’s Rights and Equality” banner at the Women’s March on Washington, a group of women who had once made history as New York City's first female firefighters roared up Independence Avenue.
The Workers’ Menace Becomes the Commuters’ Threat
Donald Trump's big swamp drain has dredged up Elaine Chao, a right-wing ideologue who was George W. Bush's secretary of labor. Tapped by Trump for transportation secretary, Chao is a consummate Washington insider who was the only member of Bush's cabinet to serve throughout his entire eight-year presidency. Chao is also married to Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Union erosion crumbled Hillary Clinton’s blue wall
Democrats had good reason to believe that Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania would remain a solid fixture in their "blue wall," the bulwark of states that had voted their way in the previous six elections. The race seemed tight in Pennsylvania in early November, but national polls consistently gave Clinton the edge, and hardly anyone thought Michigan and Wisconsin were truly in play. What a difference a couple of weeks makes. The thunder of that blue wall's crash has since shocked the world.
Knocking on Labor’s Door
View Inside 312 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 14 halftones, 6 figs., 1 table, appends., notes, bibl., index Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-3207-0 Published: September 2017 eBook ISBN: 978-1-4696-3208-7 Published: August 2017 Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-5477-5 Published: August 2019 Justice, Power, and Politics Buy this Book Hardcover $32.95 Paperback $27.95 E-Book $19.99 Amazon Kindle Apple iBookstore Barnes and Noble Ebooks For Professors: Free E-Exam Copies Author Blog Follow the Author on Twitter Justice,...
Let Penn State grad students decide if they want to form a union
A directive on how to fight graduate employees’ unionization efforts was the last thing I expected Penn State University’s Graduate School to plop in my email in-box on Friday morning. Yet there it was. Under the heading of “Guidance for faculty and other supervisors of graduate student assistants,” the document clearly seeks to enlist faculty and staff in its resistance to graduate employees’ burgeoning union campaign at State College.
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