Portside

Since 1900 life expectancy at birth has risen from 47 to 79, nearly doubling the average American lifespan. But death rates of U.S. whites aged 45 to 54 increased by 8% from 1999-2013- all among whites with a high school education or less. But efforts to explain the numbers have confused or obscured race and class, creating much misunderstanding. As Jack Metzgar argues, there are no simple answers in describing trends for white workers without college degrees.

The leaders of two of the nation’s biggest, most powerful labor unions — the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — are completing a plan that calls for unusually close cooperation in political campaigning, organizing and bargaining in states and cities across the United States.

“Saturday Night Live” veteran Dana Carvey resurrected his “Church Lady” character in a surprise appearance last night following Donald Trump becoming the presumptive Republican nominee this week.

Proposed cuts would have slashed members' pension checks by 50% or more.

The English poet John Daniel provides a perfect Mother's Day memory of his hard-working Mum, Violet Daniel, who defied the usual expectations of mothering. Happy Mothers Day!

The initiatives of the New Deal and FDR's Second Bill of Rights represented less a permanent triumph of the welfare state or a model for a progressive way forward than a unique combination of non replicable circumstances, including a temporary cessation of enduring tensions involving race, immigration, culture, class, and individualism, which served to sustain a pale social democratic reform for just a few decades. What followed instead was today's new Gilded Age.

A new union federation in South Africa is being formed through the leadership of unions and individuals expelled from Cosatu with the aim of organizing the unorganized -- Cosatu denounced the move as divisive and as leading away from the struggle for jobs and against monopoly capital.

Trump's voters are better off economically compared with most Americans. The definition of "working class" and similar terms is fuzzy, and narratives like these risk obscuring an important and perhaps counterintuitive fact about Trump's voters: The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That's well above the national median household income of about $56,000.

The new documentary film Solitary goes inside a supermax prison to discover what it’s like being in solitary confinement—a practice experts now describe as unnecessary and prisoners say is torture.

The actions by the Verizon workers show that it is possible to fight back against the power of employers to dictate the terms of the employment relationship. They remind us that the supremacy of big corporations, like technological changes and market forces, are not inevitable but reflect political and managerial choices. It appears workers are finally finding a way to counter the corporate strategies that have defined—and held back—the U.S. economy in recent decades.