Portside

Brilliant, tedious and irredeemably evil, Leni Riefenstahl’s "Triumph of the Will" (1935) is one of the great conundrums of cinema history. Now released on DVD.

Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner's slate of labor-busting measures has touched off a lengthy budget impasse in Springfield.

Some grated Parmesan suppliers have been mislabeling products by filling them with too much cellulose, a common anti-clumping agent made from wood pulp.

California Assemblywoman Lorena S. Gonzalez introduced a bill to allow groups of 10 or more independent contractors working for "hosting platforms" such as Uber to join worker organizations and bargain over pay and working conditions. This would allow workers to have union-like associations, but they would still be considered contractors and not employees.

What’s unspoken is that the best proof that the unions didn’t have much of a role in the protest is that historically they’ve shown little ability to mobilize significant numbers of students in the Bay State. Typically, union-backed coalitions like BEJA will pull a few dozen to a few hundred people to such protests. Students or non-students, the story is always the same. The people who turn out will be a mix of union and nonprofit staffers.

Last summer’s surprise hit returns to NBC, tackling infidelity and Bill Cosby in its first two episodes.

Gig workers include Uber and Lyft drivers, DoorDash and Postmates food delivery drivers, Handy house cleaners and Amazon "flex" workers who deliver packages. They are technically independent contractors who set their own terms of employment — taking as many or as few jobs as they want — but they have no control over wages, which can be changed at a whim by the companies in charge.

On February 28 2016, Delmer Berg of northern California died. He was last known veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade--the 2800 American volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War. Here is a tribute for them all.

Matthew Desmond is an academic who teaches at Harvard - a sociologist or, you could say, an ethnographer. But I would like to claim him as a journalist, and one who has set a new standard for reporting on poverty. In Milwaukee, he moved into a trailer park and then to a rooming house on the -poverty-stricken North Side and diligently took notes on the lives of people who pay 70 to 80 percent of their incomes for homes that are unfit for human habitation.

Republicans in Virginia have proposed a referendum in November to strengthen the state's existing open shop laws. In this, an opportunity presents itself that labor unions must take. Our goal should not simply be to defeat the proposal: it should be a realignment of the conversation surrounding the role in labor unions in Virginia’s—and America’s—political economy.