Portside

To help the contingent faculty movement prepare for its next big battles, the authors have produced a timely history of union activity among “second tier faculty excluded from the tenure system.”

Last November, Trumka tried, unsuccessfully, to block any state convention discussion of a general strike contingency plan in the event of a constitutional crisis (of the sort which did occur on January 6).

A rare contested race for president of the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) is currently taking place. Members have a clear choice between a union traditionalist from Boston and a progressive activist.

Unlike all the other union-backed politicians who've run for president since the mid-1970s, Bernie Sanders was a labor solidarity activist long before he was elected to anything. 

A sexual harassment scandal at AFGE headquarters is making the union’s resistance to Trump more difficult.

UHW was an incubator of talent, organizers who are still bargaining for the common good, utilizing the power of the strike, and promoting a political agenda for labor that’s focused on issues, rather than personalities.

In the run-up to SEIU’s largest and most disastrous local union take-over—involving United Healthcare Workers (UHW)—some of the first punches where thrown at a Labor Notes conference in Dearborn, Michigan ten years ago this month.

It takes continuous organizational effort—in the form of training and recruitment, new leadership development, and structural change–to insure that the bullying, harassing, divide-and-conquer behavior of bosses, big and small, doesn’t infect and weaken the “house of labor” too.

Gonzalez, in his book Reclaiming Gotham: Bill De Blasio and the Movement to End America's Tale of Two Cities argues that de Blasio has presided over the “most left-leaning government in the history of America’s greatest city." He "reports that, under de Blasio, poor and working class New Yorkers have received a $21 billion “infusion of income and economic benefits” which also includes long deferred wage increases.

Whether he wins or loses, Sanders is already helpfully tapping into rank-and-file discontent about who gets to decide what in our unions. While other big union endorsements of Clinton may soon be announced, the Labor Day buzz—at the grassroots, in early primary states—is largely about Bernie.