Portside

Microsoft and Starbucks as exceptions to corporations’ union busting; Starbucks baristas as beacons of bottom-up organizing.

By devoting $40 million to its campaign to organize non-union auto plants, the UAW is challenging not just corporate America but also labor’s status quo.

GM’s promise to cover its EV battery factories under the national master agreement gives workers a share of the gains from going electric.

With public support for unions at near-record highs and new federal rules that actually enable organizing, unions need to mount massive campaigns.

12,000 striking postdoctoral scholars reached a tentative agreement with the University of California to boost their wages and benefits.

Two extensive union programs—one long established, one new—are focusing on swaying working-class voters who, like most Americans, don’t belong to unions.

Republicans on and off the bench are moving to kill unions. But millennials—the most pro-union generation since the 1930s—may yet find a way to organize.

Once upon a time, more jobs meant higher wages. Not so today. The combination of globalization, automation, increased corporate strength, decreased union power has broken that connection.

There is nothing new about Northern factories moving to the south for lower labor costs, but starting in the 1960s, higher value manufacturing made the shift and had a more profound impact on the economy, reducing the economic divide. Meanwhile, the political divide between North and South has deepened, and the South has attempted to impose on the rest of the nation its opposition to worker and minority rightst-hrough the vehicle of a Southernized Republican Party.

Unions historically have supported minimum wage and occupational safety laws that benefited all workers, not just their members. But they also have recently begun investing major resources in organizing drives more likely to yield new laws than new members. Some of these campaigns seek to organize workers who, rightly or wrongly, aren't even designated as employees or lack a common employer, such as domestic workers and cab drivers.