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Articles by Mark Erlich
Protected: Construction’s Data Center Gamble
September 21, 2026 Analysis Is the data center boom the solution to the problems faced by buildings trades unions? A Microsoft data center under construction, Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, 2025 This content is password-protected. To view it, please enter the password below.
The Myth of the Gig Economy
The Myth of the Gig Economy App-controlled labor is less a technological novelty than yet another chapter in a much longer history of employer legal circumvention. Illustration by Lily Qian Chains of Command: The Rise and Cruel Reign of the Franchise Economy by Brian Callaci University of Chicago Press, 2026, 264 pp. Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment by Paul Osterman Harvard University Press, 2026, 208 pp. The phrase “gig economy” should be retired. There is no such thing.
Off Track - Dissent Magazine
Off Track If we wish to be a democratic nation, we need to address how a democratic citizenry is created through schooling. and ▪ Summer 2026 First grade students in Worcester, Massachusetts, circa 1955 (Underwood Archives/ Getty Images) Donald Trump has successfully promoted himself as the champion of people who feel unheard and unseen, including many minority and working-class voters.
Resurrecting the Bund
Resurrecting the Bund In Here Where We Live Is Our Country, Molly Crabapple elevates an important part of the democratic socialist tradition at a time when many are looking for just such a usable past. Executive committee of the Warsaw Garment Workers’ Union, 1917. (Wikimedia Commons) Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund by Molly Crabapple One World, 2026, 480 pp.
AG’s settlement with Uber and Lyft leaves big worker protection issues unresolved
ON JUNE 27, Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office abruptly ended an ongoing trial and settled a lawsuit that had charged Uber and Lyft with violating the Commonwealth’s wage and hour laws by improperly classifying their drivers as independent contractors rather than as employees. The deal provides rideshare drivers with a guaranteed minimum wage and other protections and sets $175 million in penalties for the two companies.
Is this labor’s comeback moment?
IN A HISTORIC breakthrough, workers at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee voted decisively on April 19 to be represented by the United Auto Workers. Following two previous failed efforts, the newly reinvigorated UAW leadership had committed $40 million to build off their successful 2023 strike by challenging labor’s long and durable inability to organize workers in the South. The vote at the VW plant represents the first successful union drive at a foreign automaker plant in the US South.
Why Modular Building Hasn’t Revolutionized Construction
In 1926, Walter Gropius, one of the pioneers of modernist architecture, predicted a “fundamental shift of the entire construction business toward industrialization.” He went on to insist that “housing will be created no longer at the construction site, but instead at specialized factories with all the ready-to-assemble components,” assuring ample capacity and affordability.
Mark Erlich Advocates for a Renewed Model of Unionization for Construction Workers
In October 2019, the Hard Rock Hotel in New Orleans, still under construction, partially collapsed, killing three workers and injuring 12 more. The ruin sat untouched as local politicians hammered out the details of its demolition, and it took 10 months to recover the remains of two of the deceased, both undocumented immigrants, from the rubble.
The Way We Build
About the Book The construction trades once provided unionized craftsmen a route to the middle class and a sense of pride and dignity often denied other blue-collar workers. Today, union members still earn wages and benefits that compare favorably to those of college graduates. But as union strength has declined over the last fifty years, a growing non-union sector offers lower compensation and more hazardous conditions, undermining the earlier tradition of upward mobility.
Can the Construction Industry Be Disrupted?
Construction is often maligned as the industry that technology left behind. Industry observers routinely deride the lack of technological sophistication in the construction industry, and have pigeon-holed it as old-fashioned and lagging behind more forward-looking and purposeful industries such as manufacturing. But that view ignores where the industry has advanced — specifically, in information management systems that have created significant gains.
Russell 'Stringer' Bell could move vaccines - CommonWealth Magazine
Idris Elba in "The Wire." Opinion Look to 'The Wire' for answers on vaccination front By Mark Erlich COVID-19 Feb 25, 2021 GOV. CHARLIE BAKER has taken a lot of heat for the woeful performance of the state’s coronavirus vaccine distribution program. Given his claim to fame as an effective manager with experience in health care administration, the rollout should have been in Baker’s wheelhouse. Yet Massachusetts has lagged behind most other states in both efficiency and equity.
Misclassification in Construction: The Original Gig Economy
Allen, Steven G. 1988. Declining unionization in construction: The facts and the reasons. Industrial and Labor Relations Review41(3): 343–59. Google Scholar | SAGE Journals Allen, Steven G. 1994. Developments in collective bargaining in construction in the 1980s and 1990s. NBER Working Paper No. 4674. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. Google Scholar | Crossref Baird-Remba, Rebecca . 2020. Construction shutdown highlights divide in benefits, pay between union and non-union.
Construction Workers and the Gig Economy
Construction Workers and the Gig Economy Misclassification is a business model that depends on tax, insurance, and payroll fraud. It is an assault of a century of hard-won workers’ rights. Mark Erlich ▪ Spring 2020 Construction workers in New York City in 2017 (Gordon Zheng/Wikimedia Commons) Last September, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 5, which imposes stringent criteria to determine whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor.
COVID-19 outbreak shows importance of unions
IF CRISES EXPOSE the underlying dynamics of a society, the coronavirus pandemic has starkly demonstrated the different options available to workers in unions and those who are not. Unionized nurses, factory workers, grocery workers, and janitors have, in recent weeks, demanded increased compensation as well as protections in terms of sanitized workplaces, gloves, masks, and other equipment.
COVID-19 outbreak shows importance of unions - CommonWealth Magazine
IF CRISES EXPOSE the underlying dynamics of a society, the coronavirus pandemic has starkly demonstrated the different options available to workers in unions and those who are not. Unionized nurses, factory workers, grocery workers, and janitors have, in recent weeks, demanded increased compensation as well as protections in terms of sanitized workplaces, gloves, masks, and other equipment.
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