WINTER 2025
ISSUE 01

₁ Keith Brower Brown and Jane Slaughter, “Work Overtime During a Strike? Auto Workers Say ‘Eight and Skate’,” Labor Notes, September 18, 2023, https://labornotes.org/2023/09/work-extra-during-strike-auto-workers-say-eight-and-skate.

₂ Such callous indifference to the lives of workers generally, but foreign workers in particular, is characteristic even in such elevated sectors as research and development and tech. See Lauren Kaori Gurley, “‘Do Not Discuss the Incident,’ Facebook Told Employee Fired After Speaking About Worker Suicide,” Vice, October 21, 2019, https://www.vice.com/en/article/do-not-discuss-the-incident-facebook-told-employee-fired-after-speaking-about-worker-suicide.

₃ We adopt this perspective from the key section of Facing Reality, “The Self-Confessed Bankruptcy of Official Society.” See C.L.R. James and Grace C. Lee, with Cornelius Castoriadis, Facing Reality (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co., 2006), 45–68.

₄ Staughton Lynd, “Where is the Teamster Rebellion Going?” Radical America 12, no. 2 (1979): 69. Lynd sought to integrate even the “owner-operator” into the orbit of working-class life and struggle in the wake of a series of strikes in the mid-’70s over the rising cost of fuel and therefore the rising cost of living.

₅ This editorial statement and the piece by Jason Flynn went to press in the weeks before the US election.

₆ “Jimmy and his mates are told that strikes are bad, that workers are led by Communists and they believe it. To an extent, that is. Certainly they believe it to the point of arguing it in a pub or of answering a public opinion pollster. But when it comes to daily activity at work they know that strikes can be justified.” Theo Nichols and Huw Beynon, Living With Capitalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 131.

₇ “An open letter to rank and file labor activists,” n.d., available at https://libcom.org/article/open-letter-rank-and-file-labor-activists.

₈ “The IWW and Political Parties,” 1909, available at  https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/unions/iww/1924/political.htm.

₉ This perhaps reminds us that the first residents of Gaza to face punishment after October 7 were those workers already on the other side of the border fence that militants so spectacularly paraglided over and bulldozed through. See Aseel Mousa, “Gaza workers stranded in Israel were tortured, interrogated,” November 23, 2023, https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/gaza-workers-stranded-in-israel-were-arrested-beaten-and-tortured.

₁₀ Toby Shelley, “Palestinian Migrant Workers in Israel: From Repression to Rebellion,” in Palestine: Profile of an Occupation, Khamsin (London: Zed Books, 1989), 33.

₁₁ Eddie Campbell, the arms factory worker who contributed to this issue, also identified the fight for a shorter work week, both in the late 1980s and today, as supplying genuine momentum to antiwar organizing efforts in the plant.

₁₂ Stan Weir, “Class Forces in the 1970s,” Radical America 6, no. 3 (1972): 37.

₁₃ These formulations crystallized in our strike at UC at the same time that comrades proposed a similar orientation in the UK’s giant UCU system. See Zara Dinnen and James Eastwood, “How to Stop a University,” Notes From Below, December 18, 2022, https://notesfrombelow.org/article/how-stop-university.

₁₄ Jack Davies and Sarah Mason, “Short of the Long Haul (Part 1),” Notes From Below, July 11, 2023, https://notesfrombelow.org/article/short-long-haul.

₁₅ This growing informal network called itself, “Long-Haul Comrades,” and its organizers have learned from rank-and-file workers, even as they often take the lead in struggles. This has contributed to a culture of rootedness and inquiry that we by no means take for granted. We are happy to serve as a home for their reflection and commentary, alongside other organizing milieus.

₁₆ The perspective has taken root in both new and established union locals in a short period of time, not least in terms of unprecedented contract wins. See, e.g., Kathleen Brown, “GEO vs. the University of Michigan,” Against the Current, September–October, 2023, https://againstthecurrent.org/atc226/geo-vs-the-university-of-michigan.

₁₇ Before we were in a position to tell our own stories, for instance at union orientations for new grad workers, we were talking about the West Virginia Teachers. We also spoke to teacher organizers who had been involved in both actions, and continued to seek the guidance of West Virginia teacher organizers as the demands of the wildcat strike were mobilized once again during a 2022 UC-systemwide contract strike.

₁₈ See Barbara Madeloni, “Massachusetts Teachers Illegal Strike Wave Rolls On,” Labor Notes, January 11, 2024, https://labornotes.org/2024/01/massachusetts-teachers-illegal-strike-wave-rolls, for a reflection on the strike wave that came out before the even more recent teachers’ strike in Newton, Massachusetts.

₁₉ And what are the analogous connections available between the novel experiences of researcher strikes in STEM fields and the nascent tech sector movement into which many of these workers graduate?

₂₀ See The Wisconsin TA Strike, directed by Mike Oberdorfer, William B. Pratt, and James W. Russell (1970), available at https://www.jameswrussell.com/the-wisconsin-ta-strike-film.

₂₁ Paul Buhle, Taking Care Of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, And The Tragedy of American Labor (New York: Monthly Review, 1999), 292.

₂₂ David R. Roediger and Philip S. Foner, Our Own Time: A History Of American Labor And The Working Day (New York: Verso, 1989), 181–182.

₂₃ The issue of hours remains for railroaders, as is clear from the interviews with Canadian railroaders carried in this issue.

₂₄ Railroad General Strike: Will Warren Stone Put The Brakes On?, The International Socialist Review, Vol. XVI, No. 7, January 1916, 390-393.

₂₅ See Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 75–104. Darton draws on accounts in Nicolas Contat dit Lebrun, Anecdotes typographiques où l’on voit la description des coutumes, moeurs et usages singuliers des compagnons imprimeurs; ed. Gilles Barbier (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1980 [1762].  Another republication in this vein is Eugène Boutmy, Dictionnaire de l’argot des typographes suivi d’un choix de coquilles typographiques curieuses ou célèbres (Paris: Les Insolites libraire éditeur, 1979) [1883].

₂₆ Régis Debray, “Socialism: A Life-Cycle,” New Left Review 46 (July–August 2007): 5–28. On early forms of workers’ associations in the print industry, see Natalie Zemon Davis, “A Trade Union in Sixteenth Century France,” The Economic History Review 19, no. 1 (1966): 48–69; Jan Materné, “Chapel Members in the Workplace: Tension and Teamwork in the Printing Trades in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century,” International Review of Social History 39 (1994): 53–82; and Philippe Minard, “Agitation in the Work Force,” in Revolution in Print, ed. Robert Darton and Daniel Roche (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989), 107–23.

₂₇ William F. Dunne, Worker Correspondents: What? When? Where? Why? How? (Chicago: The Daily Worker Publishing Co., 1925), 6.

At a post-breaktime meeting called by management at an Amazon delivery station on the outskirts of Seattle during the height of the 2023 holiday season, a site leader berates the roughly 75 “associates” gathered in front of him for tardiness in returning to work, extended bathroom trips, and the amount of informal chit chat happening on the floor. The workers on this evening shift – “sort zero” – are mostly seasonal hires, expected to be let go shortly after peak time ends in January. At least half are first- or second-generation immigrants from East Africa (Ethiopians, Eritreans, Somalis) who have taken up the job alongside friends or family members. Some speak little English and have to lean on those beside them, quietly interpreting the manager’s words. After a moment of collective silence, the gathered workers let out a few restrained laughs and go back to their job posts, understanding well that management’s words have minimal effect on how they finish the rest of their shift. 

One month before auto workers are called out to strike during 2023’s UAW “Stand Up Strike,” whole departments effectively grind production to a halt by refusing voluntary overtime at General Motors’ massive Arlington Assembly plant outside of Dallas, Texas. Tiffany Martin, an absentee reliever in Arlington’s body shop, told Labor Notes that “yesterday everyone in our area stood firm on no break overtime, no lunch overtime. The group leader [management] came around just before lunch and asked everyone again to work lunch, and even had a signup sheet for extended hours for tonight’s shift. Everyone signed the paper with a big fat NO.” Citing UAW president Shawn Fain’s weekly Facebook Live reports, workers were encouraged to exploit the lapsed contract by refusing management’s directive on a collective basis, leading to snags further down the assembly chain. “Our paint shop also was struggling to  get our trucks from [the] body shop,” Martin said. “I was also told everyone in third-shift stamping took their names off of the overtime list to come in today. They would have been on double time, and still took their names off the list.”¹

Last spring, during a strike for the first contract of a new graduate student workers union at Dartmouth College, an international worker from China went missing. She had been facing intimidation. Her advisor was pressuring her to “master out” (take a master’s degree and leave) with the threat of failing her. This is a common way that grad workers are chewed out of PhD programs at elite research institutions like Dartmouth to avoid dismissal procedures, and was a major subject of contestation in the strike.² This worker’s friends were naturally alarmed by her absence, and news spread through her department and into union circles. Collective letters were written to the campus administration and police calling for searches to be conducted, followed by demonstrations at the police station. When these went unheeded, students and workers began initiating their own search parties. After the discovery of her body, admin’s belated attempts at commemorating this life and tragedy were understandably met with raw hostility, which only intensified when the College sent out an attestation form to strikers during the official memorial service. In later discussions with this worker’s family, admin relied on one of the grad worker’s friends for translation, only hiring a professional interpreter after a joint campaign by the Chinese Student Association and the union, GOLD-UE, which also demanded travel funds for the family. More recently, the union and the Chinese Student Association have planned to collaborate on translating new contract provisions into Mandarin, including the new article requiring just cause for dismissal.

These examples do not promise obvious or clear-cut takeaways, but point in different directions for a working class and labor movement undergoing deep transformations. Their meaning is located in the particular shop floor cultures developed by workers in distinct settings, but concrete parallels can be glimpsed. At the Amazon delivery station, workers are connected to one another not only as the audience for management’s routinely insipid lectures; they are often already friends, family, or part of overlapping immigrant communities. Through these ties – to a specific work site as well as to social worlds that extend beyond the warehouse – they share an understanding of how they will (or won’t) perform their jobs. Even if it goes unspoken, they forge agreements on what will be taken: minutes in a bathroom stall, exchanges of words in the midst of their shift work. Meanwhile, through “inside” initiatives to slow down and disrupt production in solidarity with striking autoworkers in other facilities, workers at GM’s Arlington plant collectively seized opportunities that arose in their own work groups, overturning management’s commonsense expectations of them. At Dartmouth, in a more nascent sector of the US labor movement, a tragedy in the midst of a strike brutally revealed the shameless indifference of university administrators to the very lives of workers, as well as the capacious ways that coworkers and worker organizations can come through for each other. Equally, this common struggle and initiative from below forged new and deeper connections with an association that was previously distant from the cultural and organizational life of the union. Ranging from the informal to the formal, with or without the support of a labor union, and with varying degrees of success, each of these groups of workers sought new measures of control over their workplaces. At the same time, their actions unfold along well-trod paths of working-class culture and militancy.

Long-Haul emerges somewhere in between these processes and timelines – of socialization through struggle at work – even if the disorientation characteristic of the present moment makes it difficult to draw explicit connections between them. We respond to a palpable urgency within the current conjuncture, where we can detect subtle yet important shifts in the balance of class forces, accompanied by reactionary offensives in labor policy, imperial interventionism abroad, and cultural politics. While there is certainly cause for pessimism in the seemingly endless chain of catastrophes and bleak prospects at the level of parliamentary politics, fissures within the “shifting quicksand” of the status quo have shown that bottom-up struggles have better alternatives to the interlocked crises we face than the destructive paths chosen by the “politicians of official society.”³

At the same time, we perceive a real need to enliven links with past examples of initiatives, experimentation, and analysis in the workers’ movement, put forward by militant groups of workers and “close to the ground” intellectuals in their own time. If the working class in the United States and elsewhere is rewriting a politics of insurgency today, we must review the materials, analyses, and lessons they bring into the world. There exists a living archive of experience rooted in the struggle from below, one that we collectively inherit but too often fail to assimilate. Furthermore, a large gap remains between what happens here and the international scene, which won’t be filled merely by reporting. If the struggles of proletarians across borders appear as isolated, the task we set for ourselves should be oriented toward making connections visible and recognizable wherever possible.

While we can offer translations, cross-publication, and correspondence with readers, contributors, and workers abroad, we envision Long-Haul not as a means to bridge the gap – which must be bridged in practice – but as one tributary in the broader stream of working-class politics. Whereas instances of working-class self-organization, ingenuity, and radicalism today frequently unfold in ways delinked from earlier periods and contexts in practice and theory, we hope to aid in establishing concrete links with the past. By placing contemporary worker organizing in the “long-haul” of historical workers’ struggles, we intend to draw out direct connections, as well as fresh and transposable lessons, between prior organizing projects and present efforts. In this spirit, some of the contributors to this issue are newcomers to the labor movement, while others have developed the perspectives they share here over the course of decades. Contextualizing today’s labor movement in the “long-haul” necessarily entails this kind of intergenerational correspondence, where knowledge is broadcast, questioned, and deepened. It also requires that we relate distinct kinds of organizing projects, shop floor strategies, and working-class experience across industries, regions, and languages, both inside and outside of unions, within popular culture or on its margins.

While the term calls to mind the extended, solitary drives of commercial truckers, “long-haul” also references the durable contacts that workers build between shops, cities, regions and countries – and how they might proliferate into new terrain. For example, in the context of the militancy of Teamsters in the 1970s, Staughton Lynd found it necessary to demystify the romantic idea of the solo teamster: “the image of macho, country-and-western truck drivers, a little bit different from all others, ‘thinking and talking about their cowboy-like pasts, presents, and futures’.” He went as far as to warn of a “dangerous error”: that is, to suppose that the plight of truck drivers was unlike those of “miners, auto workers, steelworkers, and the rest of us.”⁴ We think that it would be no less wrong, in the present moment, to fail to apprehend our connections to such histories of struggle and practices of organization, or to see the lives and struggles of workers today at Amazon, GM, or Dartmouth College as though they were so many solitary ventures.

Following such a path, we may move from this episode of Teamster rebellion in the 1970s, which gave rise, in part, to Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), to the bewildering conjuncture of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) under Sean O’Brien in the wake of his appearance at the 2024 Republican National Convention. The past year, 2024, has been dubbed the “year of global elections,” with over 60 major elections including those in India, Mexico, Japan, the EU Parliament, France, England, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Venezuela, Sri Lanka, and the United States. The “working class,” at least in hologram form, hovered around many of these campaigns and with particular vigor in the US context, especially as O’Brien and UAW president Shawn Fain entered the fray to great publicity. This issue of Long-Haul features an account from current UPS worker, Jason Flynn, who draws our attention back to the working-class politics behind electoral grandstanding, where workers are constantly talked about but never directly addressed.⁵

Flynn’s piece sets analysis of the Teamsters’ presidential candidate endorsement process alongside the varying rank-and-file views on O’Brien’s RNC appearance and stories from the shop floor. At UPS, the multiple and varied associations that workers form in the union hall, the mess hall, online networks, and in conversations before, during, and after their shifts are shown to significantly shape their politics, and thereby the possibilities of worker solidarity and struggle. This is to say nothing of the distance between what workers might say and do and the appalling limitations of polling, as the participation of workers in confrontations on the shop floor confounds avowed politics.⁶

Nowhere was the invocation of the “working class” more vicious or more dismal in several of these electoral campaigns than when candidates sought to demonstrate their singular credentials as ruthless border enforcers. These are old strategies of enmity, resurfacing in particularly pernicious ways and directed against some of the most oppressed workers in the world. Whether such appeals are genuinely popular to the working class is not a settled matter. But it seems clear that lessons from political and organizing controversies embedded in the debates of Teamsters in the 1990s, particularly over the question of cross-border hauling into the United States, have not yet been committed to memory. Staughton Lynd’s group at the time, IMPACT, noted that the perspective on migrant workers in the Teamsters of the 1990s and Samuel Gompers’ AFL of the 1880s differed very little. Taking aim at the lapse in internationalism of the mainstream US labor movement, IMPACT castigated those union leaders competing over the “racial profiling” of the sector in order to bar Mexican workers from working in the United States. “Many if not most trucks on highways in the United States are unsafe, no matter who is driving them,” the group wrote. “Under pressure from the employers to make money, drivers routinely haul overweight loads and falsify their logs so as to drive when they are exhausted. The goods that Mexican drivers haul into the United States are often parts or products, [the] manufacture of which was exported to Mexico as a result of NAFTA.”⁷

Reactionary employers and their partners in government all but count on the durability of such historical divisions. As migrant workers are increasingly scapegoated, targeted, and attacked, especially within the rightward drift of official politics, the need to offer compelling alternatives becomes only more urgent. But migrant workers are not simply victims of employers and trade agreements; they refashion and internationalize the terrain of struggle, not least in their routine conflict with legal regimes that institutionalize exploitation. In early 1970s France, as explored in Patrick King’s contribution to this issue, the collision between a hardening border regime, a seasoned anti-imperialist movement, a heightened period of struggle between capital and labor, and political courage by immigrant workers from the Middle East and North Africa spurred debates over the international character of the working class in France and the best ways to connect fragmented struggles.

We take the position that the movement today must be considered in an international context, where seemingly small and localized struggles are a part of broader currents of worker militancy that, while shaped by local and national conditions, are not always confined to them. This has as much to do with the character of the multinational working class in the United States as with the migration of tactics in a given sequence of struggle. The potential, indeed, the potency of sustaining internationalism in the labor movement has been observed in the past year’s struggles against US support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza, which workers in a number of sectors have sought to combat.

In this issue, we feature writing from a worker in the arms industry in Britain, Eddie Campbell, whose decades of experience in anti-imperialist organizing on the shop floor offers a glimpse into the pathways the pro-Palestine movement can take here in North America, too. Through the deepening of an independent stewards’ network that does not shy away from difficult political questions, but confronts them from a position of strength and rootedness in the rank and file, unlikely achievements can be won, he claims, especially in the munitions industry where sympathetic relations between union and management have prevailed for decades. This worker recalls Vincent St. John’s point, first made in the pages of The Industrial Worker in 1909, that “the capitalists cannot exterminate a real labor organization by fighting it; they are only dangerous when they commence to fraternizing with it.”⁸

We tie these ongoing struggles within the metropole to the ways that the Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation is itself rooted in worker-led rebellion with selected translations of Arabic commentaries on the First Intifada as it unfolded from late 1987. As these passages show, Palestinian workers had a larger role in this struggle than merely providing the spark for its ignition when four workers were killed in a hit-and-run crash in Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp after commuting across the border for work.⁹ In 1987, the general strike and mobilization of various layers of the Palestinian working class are glimpsed in these translations, and presented as belonging among the Intifada’s most effective and confrontational qualities. This is an underrated aspect of the First Intifada, particularly in Anglophone scholarship and historical memory, although it was plainly apparent to observers at the time. “Alongside the mass demonstrations, the stone-throwing, the burning barricades,” wrote one commentator, “came the quiet but effective strike of migrant workers. It was weeks before the international press caught on to the significance and impact of the stay-away, but the Israeli press was quicker off the mark.”¹⁰

Another entry in this issue also explores “the other side” of a sequence from the front pages of the news through the stories of Canadian railroad workers at Canadian National Railway (CN) and Canadian Pacific Kansas City Limited (CP). These workers describe their work lives and struggles, fresh off a potentially historic strike cut painfully short by a government back-to-work order reminiscent of Joe Biden’s decision to prevent a rail strike in the United States in 2022. Control over hours both on and off the job have been the key concern for engineers, conductors, and other running trades workers at both companies. Their stories highlight the way that precision scheduled railroading (PSR) and other management innovations to speed up freight traffic and cut corners on staffing are not only changing the shape of the job and the lives of those who work it, but accelerating ecological ruination. At stake is the possibility of a dignified life in the face of companies that, to quote one CP engineer, “can never be satisfied” – but also, as they point out, the future of railroading communities, of the environment, and even, perhaps, of Canadian national identity.¹¹

Taken together, these contributions to this issue, as well as those introduced below, represent the kinds of objects and inquiries that Long-Haul commits to printing on a regular basis from here on. By bringing together seemingly disconnected analyses – from casual observations of worker agency on the shop floor to sustained and theoretically inflected investigations into historical labor organizing projects and worker uprisings – we understand the present conjuncture to be inextricably connected to the history of the workers movement, as well as to the struggle, collective in nature, over its future.