How Things Work

Articles

You Are Not Religious

6 days ago | hamiltonnolan.com | Hamilton Nolan

When asked about your religious belief, the correct response is “agnostic.” It means “I don’t know.” That’s a fact: You don’t know. I don’t know. Nobody knows. The origin of the universe? The true nature of reality? Existence after death? Please. We only discovered atoms a couple of hundred years ago. Quantum physics, a hundred years ago.
The Failure of Warren Buffett

1 week ago | hamiltonnolan.com | Hamilton Nolan

Warren Buffett, 94, has announced that he is planning to retire. He will go down as history’s greatest investor. Berkshire Hathaway, the company that Buffett spent six decades nurturing, began as a fading textile firm. Today, it is a sprawling conglomerate worth more than a trillion dollars. Buffett racked up a cumulative investment return of over five million percent during his long career. His own net worth today stands close to $170 billion.
Talking Our Way Forward

1 week ago | hamiltonnolan.com | Hamilton Nolan

“The average voter” is a term that exists primarily for political consultants to commandeer as an avatar of their own advice. “The average voter believes things have gone too far. The average voter cares about kitchen table issues. The average voter wants common sense solutions for his family.
Ideas That Cannot Be Spoken

2 weeks ago | hamiltonnolan.com | Hamilton Nolan

Most jobs come with a series of unappetizing demands. You must wake up early. You must endure a long commute. You must perform sweaty physical labor, or serve the thankless public, or corral a classroom of unruly kids, or waste away in a dreary cubicle. You must perform these grueling, tedious tasks, in exchange for an amount of money that is surely smaller than you deserve, in order to obtain food, clothing, and shelter, lest you and your family become destitute.
Two Years of How Things Work

2 weeks ago | hamiltonnolan.com | Hamilton Nolan

The site you are reading, How Things Work, published its first piece on May 1, 2023. It’s now two years old. As I did last year, I am going to give you an update on how things are going here, two years in. (There will be more important things to talk about on May Day, so I’m publishing this a couple of days early). If you’re interested, read on.
What It's Like Being a Nurse in New Orleans

3 weeks ago | hamiltonnolan.com | Hamilton Nolan

In December of 2023, in the face of an extended anti-union campaign from their bosses, more than 600 nurses at University Medical Center in New Orleans overwhelmingly voted to unionize with the National Nurses United. They became the first private sector hospital nurses to unionize in the state of Louisiana. Due to instransigence from management, they still don’t have a first contract 16 months later. On May Day, the nurses will strike for the third time since they unionized.
Corporate Lawlessness Comes Next

3 weeks ago | hamiltonnolan.com | Hamilton Nolan

Ronald Reagan, who launched the modern American age of inequality, and Donald Trump, who is riding its consequences into an ominous new era, have something in common: They were both union members, in the Screen Actors Guild. Reagan served six yearlong terms as the union’s president, beginning in 1947. He leaned on these credentials during his more important career as union buster.
The Patriotism Trap

4 weeks ago | hamiltonnolan.com | Hamilton Nolan

It was my mom’s birthday this week and we went to see the play “Good Night, and Good Luck” on Broadway. George Clooney, his hair dyed jet black, plays the newsman Edward R. Murrow, who stood up to Joseph McCarthy during the height of McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts, helping to precipitate the greasy Senator’s downfall. The parallels to our current time were easy to see.
Not Just Unions; Strike-Ready Unions.

1 month ago | hamiltonnolan.com | Hamilton Nolan

I wrote a piece for In These Times this week called “Unions Without Strikes,” which was prompted by something very big and very ominous that has been on my mind: the fact that there have been no strikes, or even real hints at strikes, in response to the most egregious government assaults on organized labor since WW2. Today, I want to briefly expand on a couple of points in that piece—one analytical, and one that I hope is of immediate practical use.
An International Minimum Wage

1 month ago | hamiltonnolan.com | Hamilton Nolan

What’s the problem with “free trade?” After all, it is quite economically rational. A company moves a factory overseas and hires cheap labor for the same reason that a company does not build its factory on Fifth Avenue and hire NBA players to run the machines: because companies always seek the lowest labor costs for the same amount of work.