Portside

With Amazon's purchase of Whole Foods, everything about the company is changing. But there remains one constant: Whole Foods still intends to be “100 percent union-free”. The hostility to worker rights that the two companies share is the future they envision for the entire hospitality industry.

International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) Local 810 in New York City, has voted to declare itself a "sanctuary union," becoming the first Teamsters local to do so.

Indigenous Oaxacan farm workers win themselves a union in the Pacific Northwest. Members are filled with ideals, starting with their own organization. Its principles for organization sound like those of radical unions throughout U.S. history. Union leaders should be workers, and the rank and file should make all decisions. No leader or staff member should have a salary higher than a worker in the fields. The union shouldn't accumulate property and large bank accounts.

Teachers at Cesar Chavez Prep will be the first teachers at a charter school in the District to unionize.

Workers at Seward Coop three locations in Minneapolis are celebrating their decision Thursday to join United Food & Commercial Workers Local 653. Ninety-four percent of those who voted in the election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board supported union representation.

As a result nurses are working endless additional shifts usually without rest. In fact, 3,940 times in the past 12 months nurses had to work for longer than 12 hours because there was no one to relieve them.

The ousting of President Dilma Rousseff has provided an opportunity for the proponents of neoliberalism and those who want to break union power. Most of Brazil's union centers fear that proposed government reforms will weaken unions and further the spread of subcontracting.

"Around 60 truck drivers and warehouse workers serving the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports began striking terminals across the region Monday morning. The strike was called by the Teamsters union Local 848 to protest what it alleges is illegal subcontracting, misclassification and wage theft by trucking companies."

The decline of the business model of old-style industrial unions may have been economically inevitable, but the lack of any new model to replace it has been socially calamitous. Unions will not be easy to fix, but allowing them to innovate would be a first step, and possibly also a last chance. How a new kind of labor organization could address the grievances underlying populist anger.

UE's General Executive Board denounced Trump's racist and jingoistic proposals for a renegotion of NAFTA and instead called for a new set of trade policies that prioritize workers common interests and relies on international solidarity as its cornerstone. Any renegotiation of NAFTA must be oriented around the improvement of workers’ lives and protection of the environment focused on those regions of the continent where conditions are the most desperate.