Portside

At the dawn of the Great Depression, millions of workers were angry and didn’t see existing unions rising to the moment. They managed to build a fighting labor movement that transformed labor law and won the welfare state as we know it.

Moving to a single-payer system could enable more unions to win excellent healthcare through group practice clinics for their members—an essential next step after winning universal access to care.

The biggest innovation in Warren’s platform is a private right of action in the federal courts against employers. The biggest disappointment of Warren’s labor plan is her studious avoidance of a just cause right to your job, as Sanders has proposed.

Any candidate who wants to appeal to voters on labor issues has to propose bold solutions to even be noticed, standing next to Sanders and Warren.

Last month, the National Labor Relations Board sought an unprecedented injunction against Laborers Local 79 in Staten Island to stop them from inflating a rat balloon. Unions must fight back.

MOSTLY ABSENT FROM THE STORY of Max Rose’s ground-breaking victory are unions. The New York state AFL-CIO endorsed Donovan, the Republican incumbent. Many individual unions did the same

The labor movement has suffered constant attacks and a demoralizing decline. But labor unions were in bad shape in the 1920s and came back. What can we learn from history?

Our greatest power is still the work we do and our occasional refusal to do it.

The NLRB even potentially has the power to reverse “Right to Work.” One open question is whether the legislative intent of the Taft-Hartley act was merely to ban union membership as a condition of employment—not whether unions could negotiate mandatory fees for grievance representation services.

Forty thousand Verizon workers have now been on strike for a month. These days, a strike of the Verizon action’s scale and duration is exceedingly rare. That’s largely because the stakes for workers are so high. Strikers don’t just lose their pay and benefits — they risk losing their job entirely.