Portside

The strike and union campaign at Klein Management are part of a larger movement among indigenous Mexican farm workers, which is sweeping through the whole Pacific coast. Work stoppages by Triqui and Mixteco blueberry pickers have hit Sakuma Farms in Burlington, Washington, for the past three years. Workers there organized an independent union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, and launched a boycott of Driscoll's, the world's largest berry distributor.

It might surprise unionists here, that Vietnam not only has a labor newspaper, Lao Dong (Labor), but that it has a staff of about 200. It's a mainstream publication and the second most widely read newspaper in Vietnam, with a print run of 40,000 and another 200,000 digital subscribers. And Lao Dong has deep roots, having been published since 1930. This is in remarkable contrast to the United States, where we have no national labor newspaper.

In spite of the growing sense of disbelief and horror surrounding the lead contamination of drinking water in the Michigan city of Flint, at least one thing is clear: that the catastrophic levels of pollution and destruction are a direct result of the extreme policies pursued by the Michigan's right-wing leadership.

When President Obama appointed Dollie Gee to the U.S. District Court in 2010, he undoubtedly didn't expect her to mount a frontal challenge to his administration's detention and deportation policies. But five years after her elevation as the first Chinese American woman on the federal bench, Gee ruled last summer that holding Central American women and children in private detention lockups was illegal.

On the plane to Hanoi last December, I opened my copy of the NYT to find an article by Dave Philipps: "After 60 Years, B-52's Still Dominate the U.S. Fleet." The piece stuck with me as I traveled through north Vietnam, trying to unravel U.S. amnesia towards the people of this country and what they call "the American war." Philipps ends with a quote from a former South Vietnamese Navy officer, Phuoc Luong. "In Vietnam we didn't use it (B-52s) enough. That's why we lost."

Speech given at the 79th Annual Celebration of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Berkeley, California 11/8/15

Low pay, abusive conditions, no union representation - employees are fed up and fighting back. About 255,000 people work directly in Juárez's 330 maquiladoras, about 13 percent of the total nationally, making Juárez one of the largest concentrations of manufacturing on the US/Mexico border. Almost all the plants are foreign-owned. Eight of Juárez's 17 largest factories belong to US corporations,

Mythology has hidden the true history of how and why the great grape strike started, especially its connection to some of the most radical movements in the country's labor history. After 50 years that silence is lifting. Dawn Mabalon, a history professor at San Francisco State University, has documented the radical career of Larry Itliong, who headed the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), one of the two organizations that carried out the 1965 strike.

While the most dramatic protest this year took place in Baja California, the same anger is building among indigenous farm workers all along the Pacific coast, from San Quintin in Mexico to Burlington, an hour south of the U.S. border with Canada. Two years ago Triqui and Mixtec workers struck strawberry fields in Skagit County in Washington State. Two years before that, Triqui workers in the Salinas Valley rebelled against an inhuman work quota, and immigration raids.

On May 18 in Fresno, California, the state's Court of Appeals for the 5th District ruled that a key provision of the state's unique labor law for field workers is unconstitutional. Should it be upheld by the state's supreme court, this decision will profoundly affect the ability of California farm workers to gain union contracts. At issue is the mandatory mediation provision of the state's Agricultural Labor Relations Act.