Portside aims to provide varied material of interest to people on the left that will help them to interpret the world, and to change it.
Portside Labor
Posted by Portside on June 16, 2013
BLOOMBERG
In April, the union included four billionaires on its “watch list” of money managers that support groups the labor organization said are hostile to traditional public pensions. The groups included StudentsFirst, an organization that backs eliminating tenure and funding charter schools at the same level as public ones. Daniel Loeb, founder of Third Point LLC, an activist investor is the only one of 33 managers targeted by the AFT to push back publicly against the union.
Posted by Portside on June 14, 2013
IndustriALL
The first copy of IndustriALL Global Union’s biannual print magazine “Global Worker” was launched this week at the 28-29 May IndustriALL Executive Committee.
Posted by Portside on June 14, 2013
IndustriALL
The first copy of IndustriALL Global Union’s biannual print magazine “Global Worker” was launched this week at the 28-29 May IndustriALL Executive Committee.
Posted by Portside on June 13, 2013
Washington Post
Brad Plumer's blog post summarizes a long and interesting essay in the latest issue of "Democracy" that analyzes the decline, and long-term outlook, of private-sector unions in the United States. He highlights 3 factors: Taft-Hartley was the beginning of the end for unions in the private sector; labor’s recent attempts to launch new organizing drives aren’t working; and organized labor tends to expand only at rare points in history.
Posted by Portside on June 12, 2013
Dirt Diggers Digest
The study, which updates a 2004 report by the committee, reviews the hidden taxpayer costs stemming from the fact that many Wal-Mart workers have no choice but to use social safety net programs -- such as Medicaid, Section 8 Housing, food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit -- that were designed for individuals not in the labor force or those working for small companies that failed to provide decent compensation, not a leviathan with $17 billion in annual profits.
Posted by Portside on June 11, 2013
Reuters
Low-cost labor has attracted Western brands to the Southeast Asian country and garments now account for around 75 percent of its exports, but strikes over pay and working conditions have become common. Thousands of workers at Sabrina (Cambodia) Garment Manufacturing Corp went on strike for higher pay from May 21.
Posted by Portside on June 9, 2013
Market Watch (The Wall Street Journal)
Sharp cuts in government spending implemented March 1 as part of the sequester are slowing the recovery. The federal government shed another 14,000 workers in May, for a total of 45,000 jobs cut over the past three months. The federal work force now is smaller than at any time since February 2008.