Portside

While some of the world's economic and political elite gathered in Davos, Switzerland for the annual World Economic Forum, a United Nations agency reported that there has been an increase in unemployment planet-wide of 28 million since the onset of the current economic crisis five years ago. One million jobs were lost in western capitalist economies last year alone and three million in the rest of the world.

Reader comments on Literature for Labor Activists - A Novel Idea: Fiction for Labor Activists; Academic Freedom Under Attack at Brooklyn College and AFT President Randi Weingarten's Letter to Brooklyn College President; and on Postal Cuts; Henry Wallace; The Treaty of Guadalupe Idalgo. This Sunday, Unity March & Rally

CORRECTION: Savaging Primitives: Why Jared Diamond's `The World Until Yesterday' Is Completely Wrong; Reader Comments on Jared Diamond; Julian Assange; Henry Wallace; Mali; Announcements - Everybody Against Austerity; Rally for the Cablevision 22 - New York - Feb 6; Students are Crashing Fashion Week; Adidas Workers Speak Out at NYC Fashion Week! - New York - Feb. 10

Chinese workers to vote on union leadership.

The austerity agenda that would cut services for working Americans in order to maintain tax breaks for the wealthy—and promote the privatization of public services—has many faces.

Instead of sanitizing the Muslim right as a way of fighting racism in the North, Meredith Tax argues that the left should develop a strategy of solidarity with democrats, trade unionists, religious and sexual minorities, and feminists struggling in the Global South against both neo-liberalism and fundamentalism.

Stop the "austerity bomb" and repeal the sequester.

This is the last of five articles analyzing the key issues the Obama administration faces over the next four years.

A recent court ruling puts in jeopardy a year’s worth of NLRB actions across the country.

Many activists rely on fiction for inspiration, new perspectives, and, of course, entertainment. For some of us, novels even helped start us down our paths of activism. Union density in United States has declined yet again - only 11.3% of American workers now belong to unions. Labor histories can play a key role in the education of a new generation of working people, and novels, can make the case for working people's rights.