What if workers at a firm democratically decided how the work is to be done and where the profits should go? Worker co-ops already exist, of course, and many have been quite successful. So how much of a challenge does the cooperative form of organization pose to the capitalist status quo? Ian Seda-Irizarry talks about the strengths and limitations of the cooperative model.

Academic workers -- from exploited staff to tenured faculty to poorly paid adjuncts and grad students -- are on the chopping block, as states target public education from coast to coast. Union leader and political scientist Steve London talks about how the Professional Staff Congress, which represents workers at CUNY, is fighting back against austerity meted out by Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo. He also revisits the New York City fiscal crisis of 1975 and its parallels with today.

Last Friday, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed into law a bill that strips the state's public workers of most of their collective bargaining rights, following almost a month of mass demonstrations. Where did the protests come from and who sustained them--the national leadership of unions or rank and file members? Labor journalist Steve Early discusses organizing in a time of austerity. And he considers the trajectory of a generation of Sixties activists into the leadership of unions that have gone to war with each other over the last several years.

From the mid-1960s to 1981, working class people waged a double battle against their bosses and often ossified unions in a period of tremendous labor militancy. Yet that history has been written out of the books about the period, which tend to characterize workers as reactionary and prowar. Labor historian Cal Winslow and Mike Hamlin of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement set the record straight.

Dark and forbidding: it's a phrase that describes the lives of miners, who often toil for unconscionably low wages in one of the most dangerous industries in the world. Miners and the social and political forces that fuel deadly mining practices have attracted the attention of the poet and labor activist Mark Nowak. He talks as well about trade union movements and transnational conversations among working people.

Union membership has been falling for decades, yet trade unions still give workers significant power on the job. And there are great hopes that the decline in union density may be reversed, with some pinning their hopes on the Employee Free Choice Act. Michael Yates discusses organized labor, EFCA, radicalism and working class identity.