Portside

Above all else, True Detective wants to explore the role of Men in Society.

Before winning over AFL-CIO, she hopes to gain backing of individual unions.

California poet Charlotte Muse tries to enter the mind of a person capable of committing torture, justifying torture, an issue from the George W. Bush era that refuses to fade away.

The policy shortens the timespan from when the board approves a union's request for a workplace organizing election to when that election is held to as little as 11 days. Previously, the process often took one to two months. The board formally announced the rule in December and it went into effect April 14.

When farmworkers migrate, they carry with them their organizing experience and transnational networks—and a powerful potential for cross-pollinating fights. Recent struggles in Baja California, Washington State, Vermont and Ontario all demonstrate the power of those connections.

Max Blumenthal, whose book The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza allows the young men and women of Gaza to speak, offers a gripping and unembellished look at the misery on the ground in the Gaza Strip during the Israeli government’s homicidal Operation Protective Edge in summer 2014, the third war in this tiny stretch of land in the last six-and-a-half years.

"Humans are the most curious among animals," writes Caspar Henderson in this review of Alberto Manguel's meditation on inquisitiveness. "Even very young humans are better" than other animals, even the smartest ones, "at noticing the novel, the accidental and the serendipitous and at using that experience to imagine new opportunities.' Henderson's review is a kind of "three-cheers" for this special quality that is among those that distinguish our species.

Based on a true story, 'Jimmy’s Hall' is about Jimmy Gralton the only Irishman deported as an illegal alien from Ireland, the land of his birth – without so much as a trial! Of course Gralton’s true crime was to fight against the reactionary church, aristocratic landowners and narrow nationalism by setting up a hall where ordinary people could dance to jazz music, study art and pursue a more class conscious politics during the Depression.

"This ruling that overturns city pension cuts and protects the life savings of city workers is a win for all Chicago," AFSCME Council 31 executive director Roberta Lynch said. "All city residents can be reassured that the Constitution--our state's highest law--means what it says and will be respected, while city employees and retirees can be assured that their modest retirement income is protected."

There is nothing new about Northern factories moving to the south for lower labor costs, but starting in the 1960s, higher value manufacturing made the shift and had a more profound impact on the economy, reducing the economic divide. Meanwhile, the political divide between North and South has deepened, and the South has attempted to impose on the rest of the nation its opposition to worker and minority rightst-hrough the vehicle of a Southernized Republican Party.