Portside

Despite constant harassment, retaliation and intimidation by permit holders and dispatch companies over the last five years, and despite obstruction by public agencies, the taxi workers workers stuck together, fought back against injustice, and prevailed. It reminds and teaches all of us that a union is not formed by formal government recognition, it is formed by workers standing together to fight for justice and a brighter future for their families.

When Bill McKibben says that "there are no jobs on a dead planet," he is, no doubt, stating the obvious. Labor, on the other hand, retorts: What good is a living planet dominated by dead labor? In many ways, this essay simply suggests that any labor plan to tackle climate change must find a way to address this tension.

USAS is the country’s largest student labor organization. The group’s main gripes with TFA and its Peace Corps-like model for American education, bringing college students—most from elite universities—to teach for a short period of time in some of the country’s poorest school districts, are that it is inadequately training teachers and promoting a for-profit, anti-union education reform agenda.

One weapon in a Union's arsenal is using Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) complaints against an employer. In this article, Attorney Robert Schwartz explains the basic uses of ULP's.

Unions in Afghanistan want the new government to pass legislation on workplace safety and a living wage, and to focus economic development on agriculture in order to relieve massive unemployment. Both "hopeful and pessimistic,"about the future, the National Union of Afghanistan's Workers and Employees, while pushing for the right to collective bargaining and freedom of association, considers these distant aspirations.

New Volkswagen policy likely to allow labor groups, including the United Automobile Workers, to represent workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

On Friday, November 7, COSATU (the Congress of South African Trade Unions), the country’s main federation of trade unions and organisations of the working class, has expelled one of its founders, the militantly socialist National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA). This has major implications for political movements in South Africa.

There are more than forty thousand Chinese restaurants across the country—nearly three times the number of McDonald’s outlets. The restaurants, connected by Chinese-run bus companies to New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, make up an underground network—supported by employment agencies, immigrant hostels, and expensive asylum lawyers—that reaches back to villages and cities in China, which are being abandoned for an ideal of American life that is not quite real.

In December 2013, Baldemar Velasquez, the founder and President of the American farm worker union the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), briefed the British House of Commons on the state of human rights for tobacco farm workers in the United States. His report raised deep concern amongst MPs. On July 26 and 27, 2014, we met with farm workers in the fields where they work and within the camps where they live.

Election day round up shows a few union victories in local races and in referendums even in conservative states despite the over all tide of labor defeats. When voters saw working-class issues directly on the ballot, like raising the minimum wage or guaranteeing sick leave, they voted for them.