Portside

The New Voice wasn’t just about growth, it envisioned a labor movement that reclaimed its place as a powerful force for justice in the community and strongly allied with the country’s progressive intelligentsia. But organizing was the magic word.

Born into the segregated rural South, James Gustave ("Gus") Speth didn't see the oppression and poverty his black neighbors faced. A confrontation at a northern university with civil-rights advocates in the early 1960s triggered a life-long moral compulsion to support the burgeoning civil rights struggle. The newly minted anti-racist grew into a leading environmentalist, political activist, prolific author and Yale dean. The book under review is his memoir.

As public worker union growth ran into the realities of an increasingly conservative national climate, effective advocates for labor, like Victor Gotbaum -- who passed away on April 5 --like many of his peers, proved unable to find a way to keep renewing union power.

In her eleventh novel, God Help the Child, Toni Morrison has created what Walton Muyumba calls "a tragicomic jazz opera played out in four parts." Here is his review of this eagerly awaited new work by the artist who is arguably the greatest novelist working in the United States today.

Documentary film of the 1984-85 British miners' strike that ended in defeat. This was a great victory for the Conservative Party of Margaret Thatcher and a monumental event in the union history of the British working class.

However, skillful propagandist that Kennedy is, in her effort to whitewash history and try to ferret out something positive in a colossal debacle, there’s something even she can’t hide. Look closely at the newsreel clips as the NVA tanks roll into what was renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Not only are the soldiers jubilant, but look at the smiling faces of the Vietnamese masses as they are being liberated from decades of Japanese, French and Yankee occupation and imperialism.

In the last few years we have seen an unprecedented number of cities set citywide minimum wages. States - even fully red states - are also raising wages, and many are indexing those to inflation. Minimum wage and living wage campaigns are on the agenda in many other countries as well. Where did this movement for higher wages come from? To what extent is it helping build worker movements and improve workers' lives?

Although right-to-work laws are proffered as part of a state’s economic development strategy, their real goal is to undermine workers’ collective voice and power.

This biography of flavor is a fascinating adventure about the origin and nature of taste

Pleas from Simon, Andre Royo and Wendell Pierce, among others, are an acknowledgement of the real-world authority we’ve granted to “The Wire,” one of the most venerated shows ever to air on American television.