Portside

After receiving major bribes from Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindall, Chiquita is abandoning Gulfport Miss. for New Orleans. This is another chapter in United Fruit/Chiquita's sorid anti-union history.

Fast food workers from around the world participated in a strike against McDonalds and other low-wage employers in an ongoing struggle to demand a living wage. Meanwhile, strikes erupted in Turkey in reaction to government inaction and possible complicity in a disastrous coal mine explosion that has left hundreds of miners dead.

Massachusetts Teachers Association delegate Barbara Madeloni elected next union president. She is known for refusing to participate in a standardized teacher-licensing program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is part of a growing teachers insurgent movement being elected across the country.

Low-income workers from 150 U.S. cities and 33 countries in protests on Thursday to call attention to wealth inequality.The protest comes amid a national push to raise the minimum wage - and it could mark a significant moment in the campaign, according to John Logan, a professor of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University.

Historian Mark Lause discusses an intriguing slice of baseball history, including the Knights of Labor influenced fight for labor rights and against the color bar in baseball. Great even for those who don't associate spring with baseball!

Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis specifically said the union is willing to consider reducing benefits for those who still are working, although she emphatically ruled out changes for members who already have retired. But such compromise wont come until the city and the school board agree to contribute more to pensions each year in order to at least partially make up for a contribution shortfall that occurred during much of the past two decades.

Organizing practice and research have shown that the recruitment and development of grassroots worker leadership is key to winning organizing, contract, and political campaigns. Despite the broad endorsement of leadership-development organizing and a collection of truly inspiring leadership development stories, when asked, worker leaders consistently report varieties of leadership underdevelopment.

New leadership, a Membership Action Team organizing plan, and a 22 month contract campaign that included two strikes, produce a strong bargaining agreement covering 22,000 hospital and campus workers at the University of California. The new contract offers protections against subcontracting, limits on temporary workers, wage increases, and "strong benefits," among other items.

A new book profiles alternative models of labor organizing in New York City, including worker centers and innovative strategies to organize workers in one of the most unequal cities in the country. New Labor in New York, edited by Ruth Milkman and Ed Ott, is now available from Cornell University Press.

Andrew Gross Gaitan, director of the Service Employees International Union's airports division, which supports the measure, said unionized companies could develop labor peace agreements with the unions representing their workers or any other organization or employee committee. Non-unionized companies elsewhere have reached such agreements, he said. Mayor Eric Garcetti, who received $198,000 in contributions from SEIU in the last election, backs the proposal.