Portside

San Francisco and Oakland pass minimum wage propositions.

San Francisco voters approved Proposition J. This will increase the minimum wage to $15 by July 2018.

Unions exist in only a handful of schools, all of them Conservative movement-affiliated or pluralistic, and the number is dropping. Over the past year, three Conservative Jewish day schools have effectively eliminated their teachers unions. Perelman Jewish Day School, an elementary school just a few miles away from Barrack, and the Solomon Schechter School of Greater Boston have both declined to negotiate with their teachers unions.

The jobless recovery means massive speedups for many workers you depend on.

Former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein on how to raise the quality and performance of teachers.

Can privately invested pension funds be disconnected from destructive financial patterns and deployed in socially positive ways? Can neoliberal capitalism be forced to provide decent pensions to all workers? Can a predatory private financial system be reformed?

There is no way of addressing the various popular desires which neoliberalism failed to fulfil without a radical programme of democratic reform. Only if publics are genuinely enabled to engage in meaningful, open-ended collective decision-making in a range of spheres can the justifiable sense that things are being done being done to them by people they did not authorise to do them actually be assuaged.

A book review by Michael Hirsch of Stanley Aronowitz's latest book, The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Workers’ Movement, Verso 2014. Stanley Aronowitz is a former factory worker and organizer with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the Oil,Chemical and Atomic Workers. Mr Hirsch writes that Aronowitz argues for direct action, workplace democracy and that unions become partners in job and community struggles. He calls this a book of wonder.

True, a Big Mac here costs more — $5.60, compared with $4.80 in the United States. But that is a price Danes are willing to pay. “We Danes accept that a burger is expensive, but we also know that working conditions and wages are decent when we eat that burger,” said Soren Kaj Andersen, a University of Copenhagen professor who specializes in labor issues.

Guy Standing argues that there is a new class in the global economy - the precariat. The precariat is growing, but fighting for democratic rights. Will the precariat be the vanguard of a new progressive era?