Portside

Cal Winslow lays out the context for the breathtaking admissions of Dave Regan, President of SEIU UHW, regarding the forced transfer of 70,000 long-term care workers from UHW into the newly formed SEIU Local 2015.

AMC’s new show goes beyond the obvious questions about what happens when robots can think like people.

The award-winning poet Julia B. Levine opens her eyes to global tragedies we leave for our children to inherit and our attempts still to shelter their innocence from what will haunt them.

Public sector unions are playing defense. They need a plan to convince employees to join (or stay in) the union. But they're operating in a difficult terrain, after years of cuts and concessions.

Worker participation does not consist in attendance at purely formal meetings but rather in taking part in real discussions about wages, training, conditions at work. We use no shock therapy. Changes cannot be decreed, they are first debated by all the workers, by the whole population. We are proud of Cuban workers' capacity for resistance, for creativity. We are aware of the issues at stake and we are confident. We, Cubans, are not a bit afraid!

In higher education, whether as affordable land-grant state colleges, tuition-free municipal universities, grants to children of the poor or need-blind admissions, access to learning was at least prized as a right, not a privilege. As tuition and administration costs soar, the number of low-paid adjuncts explodes and financial aid collapses, college funding shifts from the public purse to student debt. Wither democracy or plutocracy?

As part of the deep and broad reaction to the killings in Charleston, historian Chad Williams and his colleagues have put together a deeply informative and useful bibliography of essential readings on African American life and history, and on the struggle against racism. We have provided a link to the project, below, followed by a short article on it, published in The Guardian, by Marta Bausells. More links and information are available at the Guardian site.

In an upset victory, San Francisco educators have elected a new union president who promises to empower members, take on standardized testing, and back struggles for affordable housing.

The films that opened and closed the Human Rights Watch Film Festival - Marc Silver’s 3 ½ Minutes, Ten Bullets, and Stanley Nelson’s The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution - tell interlocking stories. Although more than four decades separate the events they trace, there is a connection between what happened in the 1960s, when cities exploded in the wake of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther Kiing and discord today.

The Chicago Teachers Union has gained a reputation for organizing alongside community groups over broader social justice issues of race and class. Now, from Saint Paul to Los Angeles, more teachers unions are following their lead and embracing a similar progressive model. That model includes building developing relationships with community groups and other unions and taking broader issues that impact their students’ lives to the bargaining table.