Portside

After premiering to prolonged standing ovations and plenty of critical acclaim, the slave revolt drama, Birth of a Nation, set off the fiercest bidding war Sundance has ever seen. Fox Searchlight has come out on top, landing the drama in a record-breaking $17.5 million deal, the biggest purchase in Sundance history.

Tsering Sherpa, a Queens resident who said he drove for Uber six days a week, eight hours a day, predicted the fare cuts would force him to work 10 to 14 hours a day to make his rent and car payments. “New York City just keeps getting more and more expensive,” Mr. Sherpa said at the rally. “How are we supposed to survive with less money?” “They call us partners,” he added. “But they’re treating us like slaves.”

After decades of campaigns, the global movement against sweatshops had a few modest (but important) victories. However, a recent breakthrough in Bangladesh in encouraging, and may show the way for making more dramatic changes in the garment industry.

Nevada's powerful Culinary Union and the Bernie Sanders campaign say they've resolved their issues after a kerfuffle earlier Thursday had the group at odds with the Vermont senator's presidential operation in a key early voting state.

In a not-so-distant future, Norway has elected a radical branch of the Green Party, and its charismatic new prime minister shuts down the country’s supply of oil and gas to continental Europe. Despite an impending climate crisis, the EU is none too pleased with this overnight weaning from petrol, and invites Russia to offer Norway “technical assistance” in restoring its fossil fuel production. Russian gunships descend on Norway’s oil platforms.

According to some reports, longshore workers are fed up with the NY Waterfront Commision's refusal to hire full-time workers, excessive drug testing and outsourcing of work.

Chicago poet Nathan Hoks shows a keen understanding of bad things going on in our times and then takes it all a surreal step beyond or maybe not.

The last posthumous collection of Christopher Hitchens's essays we are likely to see, the book under review shows the incomparable polemicist moved from being a practicing Trotskyist (though he never practiced enough to get good at it) to cosying up to the Washington neocons.

AFSCME President Lee Saunders explains why his union endorsed Hillary Clinton and what they are doing to help her win the Democratic Party nomination.

Many union members, both Democrats and independents, believe in the policies and the overall vision of an expanded New Deal that both the labor movement and Sanders have long promoted. Yet Sanders appears to have more confidence that the broad American public will back those ideas and reject likely Republican and media attacks on his proposals than do many top union officials who often complain about Democrats who will not support labor and its agenda.