Jeff Schuhrke

New York

Contributing Writer at In These Times

Author of No Neutrals There (@haymarketbooks, 2025) and Blue-Collar Empire (@VersoBooks, 2024). https://t.co/Uc8v3IQrWI

Articles

When US Labor Backed US Imperialism

1 month ago | jacobin.com | Jeff Schuhrke

Interview by Micah Uetricht The US labor movement was a major force to be reckoned with throughout the twentieth century, playing the key role in establishing the rudiments of a welfare state, eking out a modicum of democracy on shop floors that were previously bosses’ dictatorships, and backing a wide range of other progressive causes like the civil rights movement. There was undoubtedly power in a union. But that power wasn’t always wielded for the working class.
When South African Unionists Struck for US Workers

1 month ago | jacobin.com | Jeff Schuhrke

In many ways, Donald Trump owes his political career to deindustrialization, the late-twentieth-century process in which multinational corporations eliminated millions of unionized manufacturing jobs in the United States by callously abandoning working-class communities in pursuit of quick and easy profits. Trump has won two presidential elections in part by presenting himself to voters as the solution to the still-unresolved social and economic dislocations caused by deindustrialization.
No Neutrals There

1 month ago | haymarketbooks.org | Jeff Schuhrke |Sharon Smith |Brandon Weber |Toni Gilpin

The definitive history of the US labor movement’s complicity in Zionist settler colonialism, and a call for today’s labor militants to organize in solidarity with Palestinians. US trade unionists are often told to keep quiet and remain neutral on Palestine because “Palestine has nothing to do with unions” and “weighing in” only distracts from struggles for better working conditions.
When US Labor Helped Free Jailed Salvadoran Trade Unionists

2 months ago | jacobin.com | Jeff Schuhrke

Senator Chris Van Hollen made news last week when he visited El Salvador to find twenty-nine-year-old Kilmar Abrego García, one of the 261 men President Donald Trump forcibly shipped to the Central American nation on March 15 in direct violation of a federal judge’s order.
After Gaza Ceasefire, Labor Movement Isn’t Done Fighting For Palestinian Freedom

Jan 24, 2025 | popularresistance.org | Jeff Schuhrke

Above photo: Children wave Palestinian flags after the announcement of ceasefire and hostage-prisoner swap deal between Hamas and Israel on January 19, 2025 in Rafah, Gaza. Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images. Networks of U.S. union organizers are calling for an end to a system of apartheid in Israel. And cessation of all armed conflict in the region.
After Gaza Cease-Fire, the Labor Movement Isn’t Done Fighting for Palestinian Freedom

Jan 23, 2025 | portside.org | Jeff Schuhrke

After Gaza Cease-Fire, the Labor Movement Isn’t Done Fighting for Palestinian Freedom Published January 23, 2025 A fragile cease-fire is finally in place in Gaza after Israel carried out a 15-month, U.S.-backed genocide that killed at least 47,107 Palestinians (though the true number is likely far higher) and reduced much of the coastal enclave to rubble.
After Gaza Cease-fire, the Labor Movement Isn’t Done Fighting for Palestinian Freedom

Jan 23, 2025 | inthesetimes.com | Jeff Schuhrke

Jeff Schuhrke January 23, 2025 A fragile cease-fire is finally in place in Gaza after Israel carried out a 15-month, U.S.-backed genocide that killed at least 47,107 Palestinians (though the true number is likely far higher) and reduced much of the coastal enclave to rubble. In the days following the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, anti-Palestinian hysteria swept the U.S. political and media establishments. As Sen.
How Biden, Harris and the Democrats Abandoned the Working Class

Nov 11, 2024 | inthesetimes.com | Jeff Schuhrke

Jeff Schuhrke November 11, 2024 “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement following Donald Trump’s decisive defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris in last week’s presidential election.
How US Trade Unionists Opposed the Dirty War in El Salvador

Sep 26, 2024 | jacobin.com | Jeff Schuhrke

Working in close coordination, the State Department and the AFL-CIO’s American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) stepped up their presence in El Salvador after a group of reformist military officers seized control of the government in October 1979. Supported by the United States, the new junta aimed to keep El Salvador from going the way of revolutionary Nicaragua.
What Organized Labor Movements Today Need to Learn from the Cold War Era’s Failures

Sep 24, 2024 | lithub.com | Jeff Schuhrke

In the late 1940s, the onset of the Cold War and the accompanying Red Scare in the United States significantly constrained the labor movement. After several years of dynamic growth and unprecedented success during the New Deal and World War II, US labor was forced back onto the defensive in the more conservative political climate resulting from the Cold War—especially after passage of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act in 1947.