After 11 days, Chicago's teacher's strike is at an end, with the city agreeing to the majority of the union's demands, including: higher pay, limits on class sizes, a nurse and social worker in each school, 120 new "equity positions" (librarians, counselors and restorative justice coordinators), bilingual/special ed educators, and five make-up days for teachers and students to compensate for part of the missed instructional calendar. Read the rest

Brian Van Slyke writes, "STRIKE! The Game of Worker Rebellion is a board game about building a city-wide rebellion to stop a mega-corporation's takeover. It was created in collaboration between The TESA Collective, a publisher of games about changing the world, and Jobs with Justice (JWJ), a leading labor rights organization. It has just launched on Kickstarter. Read the rest

Google has blinked in the ongoing attempt to organize Youtube creators in a new organization called Fairtube, under the umbrella of the powerful German trade union IG Metall. Read the rest

Gaggle is one of a handful of creepy companies that sell surveillance software to school districts, which monitor every keystroke and click on school networks -- they're the latest evolution in spy-on-kids tech, which started off by promising that they'd stop kids from seeing porn, then promised they could end bullying, and now advertise themselves as a solution for school shootings, under the banner of being a "Safety Management Platform." Read the rest

When Eunice Adekemi Olamijuwon was transfered from her job as nursing leader at Wesley Guild Hospital in Osun, Nigeria, her staff celebrated by hanging a (now-viral) banner calling her a "mischievous tyrant" and accusing her of a litany of sins, from "arrogance" to "power intoxication" to "sadism" and "witch hunting." Read the rest

Amazon and its contractors are notorious for their wage-theft from warehouse workers, who are required to endure lengthy, unpaid delays while they wait to have their bags and bodies searched for stolen goods; a group of workers sued Amazon and one of its contractors, Integrity Staffing, under a Nevada state law. Read the rest

Back in 2011, I wrote a young adult novella called "Martian Chronicles," which I podcasted as it was in progress; it's a story about the second wave of wealthy colonists lifting off from climate-wracked, inequality-riven Earth to live in a libertarian utopia on Mars. Read the rest

On NPR's always-excellent Rough Translation podcast comes an incredibly complex and nuanced story (MP3, transcript) about marginalized, racialized people in public housing in Marseille who found an accepting haven in a local McDonald's franchise, and who banded together to save it -- and other nearby McD's -- in a series of direct actions ranging from occupation to threats of self-immolation. Read the rest

For two decades, the Phoenix police union has had a secret deal with the police department that required that the disciplinary records of cops would be "purged," so that no one, not even their supervisors, would be able to retrieve them. Read the rest

The NCAA is notionally an "amateur" league, but the only thing amateur about it is that the athletes (who risk their health and even their lives) are unpaid, while the universities effectively own and operate wildly profitable pro sports teams. Read the rest

Kim Kelly is Teen Vogue's labor columnist and has written a series of excellent pieces on labor politics for the #resistance glossy. Read the rest

California's Assembly Bill 5 isn't radical: it merely affirms the obvious fact that Uber and Lyft drivers (and other "gig economy" workers) are employees, something that the California Supreme Court already made obvious in the Dynamex decision. Read the rest

It's rough out there for Uber and Lyft contract drivers. And getting rougher. Read the rest

After Deadspin's Laura Wagner published an incredible, brave, detailed look at how her new private equity masters -- Jim Spanfeller/Great Hill Partners -- were running Gawker now that they'd acquired it from Univision, the company (now called "G/O Media") struck back. Read the rest

Jonathan Mann (previously) writes, "Like many people, I've been disturbed by the borg-like tweets coming out of the Amazon Ambassador program. I took a few of the bleakest ones and set them to music. It turned into an incredibly sad song." Read the rest

As Google has enacted a series of high-handed, opaque changes to how Youtube monetizes, upranks and censors videos, Youtubers have found themselves battered by the changes: they built Youtube into a global multi-billion-dollar success story, but they don't get a say in how it's managed. Now, a group of Youtubers have teamed up with Germany's powerful IG Metall trade union to fight back, using Europe's broad privacy laws and Germany's broad labor laws to force the company to come to the negotiating table and give them a say in how the service is run. You can read more about it on the Fairtube campaign site. Read the rest

In Is Labor Green? (Sci-Hub mirror), three Oregon sociologists investigate the correlation between high rates of trade unionization and low carbon footprints. Read the rest