Portside

It is the festival's Documentary Programme that offers the most bang for the buck. Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, about urban activist Jane Jacobs who saved New York neighborhoods in the 60s; it’s been awhile since we’ve seen a film about the revered muckraker, but All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone will once again raise the issue of truth in the media; the Canadian doc Black Code exposes how governments use the Internet to spy.

As far as labor leaders are concerned, former Labor Sectary Hilda Solis and her successor, Tom Perez, have delivered. "President Obama has been a good president for working people," AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says. Since his days as a community organizer in Chicago, Obama has had close relations with labor unions, and organizations such as the Service Employees International Union were among his earliest and most vocal supporters when he ran for president in 2008.

As far as labor leaders are concerned, former Labor Sectary Hilda Solis and her successor, Tom Perez, have delivered. "President Obama has been a good president for working people," AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says. Since his days as a community organizer in Chicago, Obama has had close relations with labor unions, and organizations such as the Service Employees International Union were among his earliest and most vocal supporters when he ran for president in 2008.

In the past year, UMass administrators have eliminated all funding for full-time Labor Center graduate students (including teaching and research assistantships), all funding for part-time faculty who teach the required curriculum and cut the Director's position from 12-months to 9-months. The course on collective bargaining was cut from the curriculum.

FX’s new comedy Better Things, created by and starring Louie’s Pamela Adlon, is an acerbic look at the life of a working actress raising three children.

For the first time in its 40-year history, the union of full- and part-time faculty at City College of San Francisco recently went on strike—and it worked.

Tennessee, Volkswagen, and the Future of Labor

The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, crushed by China's military forces, no longer attract much editorial space, but the protests for freedom and the massacre that followed linger in history and in the conscience of the California poet Patrick Daly.

We never know what is actually possible until we test it. It may seem a long road from a union trying to protect jobs to a union setting out an alternative agenda for the economy. But surely the main lesson of recent years is that since capitalist corporations think big as a matter of course then we will surely lose if we continue to think small. If we don't raise our expectations, they will be lowered for us. •

Contrary to a too-commonly held assumption, book author Anne Trubeck argues that while writing by hand will likely become less practiced, it will not disappear, but evolve, as she insists its variegated world history amply shows. Just one possible precedent: the metamorphosis of letterpress printing into an artisanal form.