Portside

Three years ago, when the Cambodian minimum wage was $61 per month, 200,000 workers took to the streets to ask for a raise. It was the largest-ever strike in the garment sector, but, after just three days, it came to an anticlimactic halt due to police violence and threats against union leaders. Then the "neak ta" appeared. Mass faintings in factories spread throughout Cambodia, and employers' took notice.

Kellogg workers in Memphis have been locked out for three months and replaced by scabs. Sixty percent of the workers are black. The union believe this part of an attempt to make Kellogg nationally union free.

The Fair Food Program is unique in that it creates a legal framework linking laborers, tomato farm owners, and final purchasers of tomatoes. The purchasers have agreed to pay an additional penny per pound for the tomatoes they buy. In turn, the producers pass that penny directly along to the workers. A penny-a-pound might sound like a pittance, but it represents a 50 percent raise, the difference between making $50 and $80 a day.

In 21st century late capitalism, defending the commons means defending public spaces and public services that are irreducible to mere profit-value. There are few better examples of common spaces than conduits of public and private communication. A conscious, directed effort to save postal services in the United States and Canada should be a priority of the movement for economic democracy.

An appeals court has decided that the School Board wrongly terminated more than 7,000 teachers after Hurricane Katrina. Those teachers were not given due process, and many teachers had the right to be rehired as jobs opened up in the first years after the storm, the court said in a unanimous opinion.

Since December of last year, garment workers in Cambodia have been fighting to raise the minimum wage. The government has responded with violence, resulting in the death of five workers.

As America’s labor unions have lost members and clout, new types of worker advocacy groups have sprouted nationwide, and they have started to get on businesses’ nerves — protesting low wages at Capital Grille restaurants and demonstrating outside Austin City Hall in Texas against giving Apple tax breaks. Now, business groups and powerful lobbyists, heavily backed by the restaurant industry, are mounting an aggressive campaign against them.

Patterson, New Jersey proposes $25,000 for municipal workers in new contract. There are other parts of this contract that could be better but this is a major step forward for low paid workers.

The AFL–CIO is a multifaceted institution composed of scores of autonomous unions, so President Richard Trumka’s leadership can hardly turn around this cumbersome vessel all that quickly. But the new emphasis is clear: the unions should ally with progressive partners and devote more energy to make the kind of changes in social policy that can benefit millions of poorly paid and insecure workers.

Public sector workers have been scapegoated as a cause of our poor economy, and neoliberal reforms have targeted public sector unions. But public sector workers are fighting back. Teachers in Lee, Massachusetts rejected merit pay as a protest against education reforms; other unions have begun to flip the script, putting the blame on the 1% and calling for taxing the rich.