Portside

Skeptics worry about traffic, crowded trains, scarce housing. Economists question whether tax breaks yield promised jobs

Northern California poet Dawn McGuire, author of American Dream with Exit Wound, turns a sharp eye on the American Nightmare: “Every bedroom ransom./Every day the war.”

We’re not living in the dystopias of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, the author insists, but in the shifty algorithmic universe of Philip K. Dick, where the world that the Internet and social media shape is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. In this view, it’s a world in which technology is developing in ways that fudge the difference between the human and the artificial.

The recent split in the Canadian Labour Congress over organizational issues will inhibit the search to renew trade unions. A vision of a powerful, effective, inclusive union movement of the future needs to be developed. If leaders let personal grievances or institutional rivalry dominate the discussion, we will fail, and it may take years to heal the damage.

This "very important" book offers a new examination of the role of African Americans in the American Revolution and of how racism was used in the service of creating the United States in the late 18th Century.

New Labor Forum’s “Working-Class Voices” columnist Kressent Pottenger interviewed Narbada Chhetri, former nail salon worker and director of Organizing and Advocacy at Adhikaar (a social justice organization based in New York City with approximately eight hundred members serving the Nepalese and Tibetan community), and Pabitra Dash, nail salon worker and organizer at Adhikaar, about the poor working conditions of nail salon workers in the United States. Highlights of the interview follow.

The Young Karl Marx is a nuanced and surprisingly accurate portrait of the revolutionary as a young man.

“The Catholic bishops of the United States have long and consistently supported the right of workers to organize for purposes of collective bargaining,” a U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops says.brief says. “Because this right is substantially weakened by so-called ‘right-to-work’ laws, many bishops - in their dioceses, through their state conferences, and through their national conference - have opposed or cast doubt on such laws, and no U.S. bishop has expressed support for them.”

My childhood dinners were an international smorgasbord. The scents of these dishes beckoned me from my bedroom to the kitchen, where I’d watch my mother in the final stages of sprinkling garnish. Now, in my forties, I feel I owe it to my children, to the generations that follow, to fully and actively educate myself in my family’s food.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual report on union membership on January 19th, 2018. There were several spots of bright news for unions.