Portside

If New Hampshire, Missouri and Kentucky succeed in enacting "right-to-work" bills, it would be the most states rolling back union power in one year since 1947, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Success in New Hampshire would also make it the first state in the Northeast with a "right-to-work" law. The bills are a further reflection of organized labor's falling clout. Just 10.7 percent of American workers belonged to a labor union in 2016.

Making meat and other animal food products that look and taste the same, but don’t necessitate the use of living creatures is the mission of New Harvest, a New York–based non-profit.

Today, workers at the city’s Nissan plant are facing a familiar backlash in their 12-year struggle for the right to organize a union. In a show of solidarity, this week cities across the South also steeped in civil rights history — Atlanta, Birmingham, Charlotte, Greensboro and Nashville — are organizing local actions to support the Canton workers and build regional pressure on Nissan to allow free union elections.

The show remains as smart, savvy, and blockheaded as ever.

The new figures have just come out, and we are slightly down again.

With the poet's thanks and apologies to Walt Whitman, Dan La Botz captures the spirit of resistance in today's America and reaffirms the importance of speaking up and marching, marching, marching. Note the poem below is also translated into Spanish and French.

Dockworkers in Oakland, California refused to show up to work to show their opposition to Trump's agenda on the day of his inauguration. Their strike demonstrated the potential power ordinary people have on the job, when organized.

If you go by Western press accounts, Russian leader Vladimir Putin is a strutting peacock of the Trump school of self-reflection, or maybe a classic strongman, with the caveat that he's no twit. The book under review presents Putin as more acted upon than actor, more puppet to internal and external forces than puppet master, a formidable tactician but with no grand strategy, no end-game. In other words, a politician.

In the age of "fake news" and other mysterious media distortions, this book reminds us of a "simpler" time. Joel Whitney offers a new history of how, beginning in the late 1940s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) simply (if much of the time secretly), paid writers, musicians, and artists, and sponsored publications, concerts, exhibitions, and cultural institutions as part of its Cold War arsenal.

The Service Employee International Union, along with other public sector and service industry unions, was not invited to President Trump's meeting with certain union leaders. Its President Mary Kay Henry expects to be hit hard by Trump's cuts. She hopes by expanding the Fight for $15 campaign support for unions will broaden.