Portside

Teachers' unions say that charter schools, freed from many of the rules that govern traditional public schools, will divert funding from those schools while being free to pay teachers less, eliminate benefits, and kick out under-performing students.

The recently published Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (“PURE”) study made headlines about the conventional wisdom on fats and carbs, but several methodological problems cast doubt on its conclusions.

We must get the language right. In reality, this was a strike and movement organized outside the union apparatus. This strike took shape as it did because the existing unions had neither the credibility nor legal authority to represent the workers.  West Virginia teachers and school workers have no collective bargaining, nor the right to strike.

Atlanta doesn't run on its ability to make you tune in to see what happens. It's a show about hustle; if it ever really stops being about hustle, that's likely to be just another vignette about a sudden windfall. For now, it runs on its ability to place you in a particular moment and depict the feeling of it with great precision in whatever way works best.

Nobody would call RoseAnn DeMoro, who transformed the California Nurses Association into one of the state’s most powerful political forces and a national player, retiring. But on Sunday, she will retire from the organization she has led for 32 years, saying she leaves the union “100 percent” ready to fight its battles.

The Labor Movement Should Follow Their Lead.

Inspired by student outrage at the link between politicians and the National Rifle Association, the poet find hope in the no-longer-so-innocent next generation.

Employers use lockouts to weaken unions. Lockouts sabotage the functioning of the union-management relationship, and they undermine standard and secure jobs in favour of more precariousness. Lockouts are also sometimes used to shift production from one plant or country to another, as well as to close unionized plants.

Raoul Peck’s The Young Karl Marx is the best buddy movie since George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969. It’s also among the most important films in decades, bringing to a mass audience not just the revolutionary ideas of Marx and his friend and collaborator Frederick Engels in the early days of modern capitalism, but an approach to politics and history that still has no peer.

This timely piece of work reminds us that the rights we sometimes take for granted have not always been available to all.