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Victory for Unions as Supreme Court, Scalia Gone, Ties 4-4

Adam Liptak The New York Times
A U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing workers to refuse to pay the fees would have been the culmination of a decades-long campaign by a group of prominent conservative foundations aimed at weakening unions that represent teachers and other public employees. Tuesday’s deadlock denied them that victory, but it set no precedent and left the door open for further challenges once the Supreme Court is back at full strength.

The consumption of the New South

Matt Hartman The Awl
Celebrating a progressive South means supporting the whole economy of practices that enabled our traditions in the first place. That means supporting the actual communities and the actual restaurants that have been here—that made this place a here in to begin with.

Chicago Teachers to Strike for Public Schools and Services

Samantha Winslow Labor Notes
Just in time for the 2016 Labor Notes Conference, the Chicago Teachers Union is planning a one-day strike and citywide day of action April 1. The union’s governing body, the House of Delegates, gave its stamp of approval to the action last night.

Not a Muse

Louise Robertson BlazeVOX
Love, sex, and feminism intertwine in Ohio poet Louise Robertson's wry poetic observations.

The Passion of the Bureaucrats

Tim Parks London Review of Books
It is striking how many Catholic organisations seem to do a whole range of lucrative things they were never set up to do, while still enjoying tax exemption as religious institutions. On closing these books many readers will feel that the only way out of the Vatican impasse would be to wind up the territory's anomalous statehood, hand it over to the Italian government and free the Church and above all Pope Francis to get on with their Christian mission. Right...

The Front National and French Workers

Sebastian Chwala spectrezine
A blanket assertion that the French working-class has shifted to the right is misleading. Rather there has been a “demobilization” of leftwing voters due to the deep crisis of the old industrial structures which has put labor and the left on the defensive. Old Communist strongholds have seen rising voter abstention. Workers vote for the FN in large numbers in regions where leftwing consciousness and organization had been weak.