The Power At Work Team is Taking a Well-Deserved Rest
Power At Work has seen remarkable growth in 2024 thanks to your generous support and viewership. The number of views of Power At Work’s web pages increased by 79% from 2023 to 2024. If you compare the last three months of 2024 to the last three months of 2023, the growth has been even more stunning: 273%. We are proud to continue providing you with content that keeps you coming back for more and more and more.
This kind of growth does not just happen. It requires a great deal of hard work by a small, dedicated Power At Work team led in 2024 by Northeastern students Joseph Brant and Zeno Minotti. After a long year, the team’s members need some time to reset, recover, and recharge for even more success in 2025. So, Power At Work will take a hiatus beginning the day after this post is published (December 23) through January 4. We will publish our next post on January 5.
This means you will have a large swath of time during your holiday break to read/watch/listen to the outstanding worker-power-focused content published by Power At Work over the last (almost) 12 months. Consider this a reader/viewer/listener's guide to Power At Work’s most popular and impactful content in 2024, with a light shone on a few items you might have missed that deserve your attention.
If you prefer to browse through Power At Work's entire catalogue of posts to find what you might like, simply go to the Power At Work home page, click on the web site’s “Posts” tab, and click on “All Posts” on the dropdown menu. Or click right here. You can also find Power At Work’s articles, blogcasts, and podcasts by clicking the “Posts” tab and using the dropdown menu. For The Weekly Download, just click on the Weekly Download tab on Power At Work’s front page.
You can also find Power At Work’s blogcasts on the Burnes Center for Social Change’s YouTube channel. You can stream and download Power At Work podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Overcast. Click these hyperlinks or search "Power At Work." If you use a podcast provider, please give Power At Work's podcasts a five-star rating to help others find our podcasts.
So, that’s your DIY guide. At the bottom of this post, we provide a countdown of the 10 most popular posts published on Power At Work in 2024. But before we get to the most popular posts, we want to provide you with an overview of Power At Work’s 2024 content with links that will allow you to review or re-review any posts you find interesting.
An Overview of the Year’s Power At Work Posts (with links)
Power At Work’s Bread-and-Butter Issues
2024 was an eventful year for workers, worker power, and unions, and Power At Work covered it as substantially and sincerely as we could. The Power At Work team produced or republished more than 160 separate posts (without double-counting blogcasts and their associated podcasts) and close to 50 issues of the Weekly Download that amalgamated more than 1,000 items from across the internet. The large majority of Power At Work’s published posts were entirely original content produced by Power At Work team members or authors we recruited to write original pieces. We also carried out our mission to put workers at the center of the discourse by lifting up others’ great work on these issues (and always crediting them, of course). A deep “thank you” to all our partners for allowing us to reprint your content on Power At Work.
As you might expect, a sizable plurality of Power At Work’s 2024 posts focused on strikes, other worker collective actions, collective bargaining, and worker and union organizing. Posts discussed the IAM strike against Boeing, the International Longshoremen’s Association strike against the East and Gulf Coast ports (also here), the longlasting and still ongoing strike by the News Guild against the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the possibility of a UAW strike against Stellantis, among others. Power At Work also interviewed Johnnie Kallas, Director of the Cornell ILR/University of Illinois Labor Action Tracker about the huge number of strikes and worker protest actions in 2023 (watch for another interview coming after the New Year). One worker protest that we found especially interesting was the News Guild’s threat to protest at the high-brow Met Gala that brought pressure on Conde Nast to settle their contract. Power At Work also examined the effects and effectiveness of teacher strikes. Our team was immensely proud of a short-form documentary and associated article that Power At Work produced about the hotel strike in Boston and how the Greater Boston Labor Council turned its Labor Day breakfast into a protest rally and picket line.
Power At Work with our authors and partners discussed worker and union organizing often during 2024. Power At Work blogcasts, podcasts, and articles looked at organizing on campuses and among strippers, art museum employees, service workers, not-for-profit employees, fast-food workers, manufacturing workers in auto plants (and here) and electric vehicle battery plants, farmworkers (and here), video game employees, rideshare drivers in Massachusetts, digital workers, and Starbucks baristas, among others. But we also looked beyond particular categories of workers. Power At Work brought together a diverse group of organizers to talk about their jobs and workers’ eagerness to organize in 2024. We published a post about strategies for organizing to beat union busters and another about worker-to-worker organizing. Power At Work also interviewed the leader of the AFL-CIO’s Center for Transformational Organizing and how it is coordinating efforts to “expand the we” so that organizing benefits workers’ communities outside the workplace.
Power At Work’s Take on Politics and Policy
Power At Work covered the worker-power-aspects of the 2024 election and its aftermath in nearly one dozen separate posts. The four most influential and popular posts in this category included a podcast-only, post-election interview with IUPAT General President Jimmy Williams, Jr. about his criticisms of the Harris-Walz campaign and the Democratic Party’s messaging. Another pre-election post that remains relevant and has been fantastically popular (see the top 10 list below) discussed the anti-union, anti-worker sections of the right-wing Project 2025 manifesto purveyed by people around President Trump. A third important post was a recent panel discussion with three national labor reporters about the likely effects of the 2024 election on the labor movement. A final important and popular post in this category analyzed and sought to explain working class voting results from the 2024 election.
Power At Work did not let the election distract us. We dove deeply into federal, state, and local government policies, as well. On the federal level, Power At Work examined the U.S. Department of Labor’s pending heat standard, Treasury Department regulations implementing prevailing wage and apprenticeship requirements for funding arising out of the Inflation Reduction Act, and Federal Trade Commission regulations banning non-compete clauses in employment contracts, among others. We also interviewed Senator Bernie Sanders and Secretary of Labor Julie Su about a host of policy topics, as well as Su’s involvement in large negotiations across the country.
On the state and local level, Power At Work explored Gov. Ron DeSantis’s efforts to bust most Florida state employees unions, including teachers unions, but also examined Illinois’s new Workplace Readiness Week legislation that will help young workers understand their rights and opportunities in the workplace and how unions can help them. Power At Work also addressed just cause legislation at the local level, the role of unions in narrowing the public-sector gender pay gap, and litigation and protest in Alabama to end the modern-day slave labor that exploits state prisoners.
Power At Work’s Special Focus Series
Power At Work is a project of the Burnes Center for Social Change, which is a national leader in educating about and using artificial intelligence in the public sector. Power At Work carried that AI focus into its work in 2024 with nine posts about AI, unions, workers, and worker power. This included a groundbreaking post about the use of AI to discriminate against union organizers as well as an interview of internationally renowned technology and employment law expert Orly Lobel and discussions with other academic experts in those fields. Burnes Center Director Beth Noveck and I wrote a highly popular post about the U.S. Department of Labor’s blueprint for responsible, worker-empowering AI use. Of course, Power At Work also addressed collective bargaining over AI in Hollywood and beyond.
In addition to these explorations of AI and worker power, Power At Work launched a popular series of posts aimed at college students called “Students & Solidarity” to educate them about unions and the issues that are most likely to affect students on campus and after they graduate.
Power At Work also recently published the first episode in a new series we are calling “What Could Happen Under Trump?” Simply, the series will seek to answer that question in several contexts related to worker power, unions, and worker collective action. Power At Work will publish several more episodes after the New Year, so watch your subscribers newsletter to avoid missing any of them.
Power At Work Had Fun in 2024
In 2024, we launched the Labor Oscars, which is a faux award (“The Worker”) given to movies about worker power, unions, and worker collective action in five categories. Our subscribers chose the winners with their votes on short lists of nominees drawn from a much longer list that we also published.
The Labor Oscars were wildly popular (see the top 10 list below) and so much fun that we launched the Labor Grammys 2025 (“The Guthries”) during the last few weeks to lift up songs about unions, worker power, and worker collective action. Again, Power At Work published a long list of songs to be considered. We recently announced the Labor Grammys nominees chosen by a distinguished nominating committee. Voting for the winners begins on January 6th, so subscribe to Power At Work if you have not already. Only subscribers can vote. Labor Oscars 2025 will be announced very soon after the New Year, as well, so watch your subscribers newsletter.
Beyond the Labor Oscars and the Labor Grammys, Power At Work has experimented with a couple of pure fun blogcasts to see how they would be received. Our blogcast involving a game called “Buy or Sell” was very popular, so expect to see that blogcast theme return in 2025.
A Short List of Gems You Shouldn’t Miss
Power At Work loves all its authors and all the content we produce. Nonetheless, we want to make sure you consider these five thoughtful, valuable posts that are not hyperlinked above that some of you may have inadvertently missed when they were first published:
Power At Work’s Top Ten Posts in 2024
The time has come for the big reveal. Are you ready? The ten most popular posts published in 2024 on Power At Work, in reverse order, are:
#10 – Building Worker Power in the AI Age: A DOL Blueprint
#9 – The Working Class and the 2024 Election
#8 – The AI bias we’re not talking about? Discrimination against union organizers
#7 – Students & Solidarity: One Strike, You’re Out
#5 – Power at Work Blogcast #32: Legal Assault on the NLRB
#4 – Explaining Young Workers Support for Unions
#3 – Power At Work Blogcast #53: Project 2025 and Labor - The Plan to Destroy Worker Power
#2 – The Union Density Rate Likely Increased in 2023. You Read That Right.
#1 – #LaborOscars2024: 55 Labor Movies to Watch Before the Oscars
We Will See You Again Soon, Powerful People!
With that, our holiday hiatus has begun. A special thanks to our sponsors who supported us in 2024. Thank you again to the entire Power At Work Blog team for its excellent work. Finally, a very special thank you to the Power At Work community. However you access and consume Power At Work’s content, we hope it has added a measure of solidarity, fairness, justice, education, and empowerment to your life.
The Power At Work team wishes you happy holidays and a very happy, healthy, and powerful New Year!
