Power, rights, and resistance in how people work, organize, and earn a living.
All topics
During the Cold War, the federal government treated actual or suspected homosexuality as a national-security risk. The Lavender Scare shows how political fear became a coordinated system of investigations, personnel records, firings, and exclusion from public service.
Child labor reform was a fight over more than factory safety. It asked who controlled children’s time, whether poor families could survive without their wages, and when schooling and protection became public responsibilities.
Company towns made work into an entire system of dependence. In many coal, lumber, mill, and industrial communities, employers controlled not only wages but housing, stores, credit, and local power. This article explains how that system worked, who it affected, and why its echoes still matter.
After the Civil War, the Freedmen’s Bureau became one of the federal government’s first major attempts to help formerly enslaved people build lives as free citizens. Its work touched education, labor, family reunification, legal recognition, land, and survival—while revealing how difficult freedom becomes when protection is temporary and opposition is powerful.
An explanation of the Great Migration as a strategic economic response to debt, violence, and blocked opportunity—and how migration reshaped American labor and cities.
An explanation of how sharecropping replaced slavery as a system of labor control—using debt, land access, and credit to preserve inequality long after emancipation.
Covid-19 didn’t just disrupt work—it revealed how working-class America carries economic risk through low protections, high exposure jobs, and fragile community systems, shaped by race, gender, and class.
An exploration of why some industries still resist unions, how employer strategies evolved over time, and what workers risk when they try to organize today.
An exploration of how Black communities organized labor long before formal unions—through mutual aid, community networks, and collective resistance—and how these traditions shaped American labor movements.
An exploration of why wage gaps persist across race and gender—even in workplaces that rely on neutral, standardized pay systems—and how history, access, and structure shape outcomes.
A clear overview of how convict leasing replaced slavery with a new labor system shaped by race, economics, and state power, and how this model influenced modern incarceration and labor practices.
A concise history of “low road capitalism,” showing how cost-cutting labor models shaped by race, class, and gender evolved from slavery and industrial mills to today’s gig economy—and why these patterns still define many workplaces.
Productivity metrics aren’t new — they began in systems of unequal labor, grew through industrialization, and evolved into today’s digital tracking tools. This article traces how measurement shaped the American workplace.
America’s workplace was shaped by systems that divided labor, opportunity, and protection by race, class, gender, and immigration status. This article explores how those foundations still affect the jobs people do today.
For generations, owning land meant freedom. For formerly enslaved people, farmland represented independence, stability, and the chance to pass something on to their children. But just as African Americans fought for fair housing in cities, they also faced barriers, exploitation, and discrimination in farming. This is the story of land as opportunity — and how much was lost when that opportunity was denied.
