Portside

Book Review and Interview: Jennifer Silva's "Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty." In 100 in-depth, in-person interviews, she found a new working-class adult “bewildered in the labor market, betrayed by institutions, distrustful of love, disconnected from others, and committed to emotional growth.”

Service Employees International Union President Mary Kay Henry believes fast food workers will massively increase their campaign within a few weeks.

Today, the AFL-CIO is seeking to arrest labor's decline through its Working America affiliate, which is a groundbreaking effort at large-scale community organizing, and has some as yet undefined alliance with such other progressive groups as the Sierra Club and the NAACP.

Negotiations between BART and Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555 and Service Employees International Union Local 1021 began months ago, but the two sides remained tens of millions of dollars apart on wages, pensions and health care benefits last week.

The fast food strikes could be the embryo of a new labor movement that challenges the power of organized money and the skyrocketing inequality that has made the American middle class an endangered species.

The Workers Defense Project, founded in 2002, has emerged as one of the nation's most creative organizations for immigrant workers.