Portside

Activists in the movement for black lives are working to lift the veil on one of the most powerful influences in law enforcement: police unions.

With 3,000 teachers gathered in Minneapolis for the American Federation of Teachers convention, the two Twin Cities teachers unions led a march to protest the recent police killing of an African American man, Philando Castile, at a traffic stop. Educators want to link their struggle for resources for public schools with the wider need for public investment in neighborhoods and cities, particularly for communities of color.

“Kaine did meet with union leaders in Madison. But he supported Virginia’s right-to-work laws during his gubernatorial campaign and his four years in office. Even the group that seeks to expand these laws [the National Right to Work Foundation] concedes Kaine did few things that troubled them.”

Criminally negligent police departments continue to receive billions in federal grants and funding, when instead those dollars could be poured into our nation’s school system, community health care systems and alternative strategies that keep people safe. Everyday elected officials refuse to act, Black lives are put at risk.

Secretar Clinton in addressing the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in Las Vegas called the first day of the Republican Convention "Surreal". AFSCME represents 1.6 million public sector workers. She attacked the anti-worker policies of the Republican Governors of Wisconsin and Illinois, Scott Walker and Bruce Rauner. She said Trump had no solutions to help working families. Later in the day she picked up the support of UNITE HERE.

A $10 million effort backed by the Service Employees International Union and billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer will involve intense door-knocking and phone banking in working-class communities, with an emphasis on engaging African Americans, Asian Americans and Latinos around the issues of economic inequality and environmental degradation. The initiative part of a broader effort to expand collaboration between the labor movement and environmental activists.

Warehouses belonging to Kimberly Clark Corporation — which recently had its factory seized and handed over to the workers — were found to be full of raw materials, despite the insistence from the factory's owners that they could not produce goods, Venezuelan Industry Minister Miguel Perez Abad confirmed Friday.

Since 2005, a dispersed group of sub-minimum wage workers has been performing online tasks for pennies through an Amazon-controlled marketplace called Mechanical Turk. These workers tag photos, transcribe audio, take surveys, and do whatever current computer technology cannot. Their work-product is littered across the Internet, and through academic publications, but they have largely remained invisible.

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.

By defining students as intellectual workers and transforming student unions into vehicles for social, economic, and racial justice, a new generation of young workers will transform the union movement and challenge the conventional wisdom of neoliberalism.