Portside

As more states feel they’ve been put at a competitive disadvantage by their right-to-work neighbors, the pressure only increases to follow suit and enact their own right-to-work laws. And after a while, a national right-to-work law might not be far behind. “I suspect that will happen within the next decade,” says Marquita Walker, an associate professor of labor studies at Indiana University.

The subtext is that unions are on their way out, and that taking actions like agitating for pay and benefits will only hasten their disappearance. Recent events, however, are pointing in the opposite direction. Labor organizations are starting to show new creativity and militancy in attaining their goals.

An estimated 15,000 teachers and their supporters rallied in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday, threatening to strike should union and school district representatives fail to reach an agreement to reduce class sizes, raise teacher pay, and eliminate the existing system for evaluating educators.

Late last year, the International Center for Joint Labor Research, the first institute of its kind in China, was shut down, with little warning or explanation.

Michael Harrington, a founder of Democratic Socialists of America believed that to change the consciousness of a nation, one had to be prepared to build an organization, start a publication, speak in a thousand halls to crowds of hundreds, or scores, or tens, if necessary, recruiting comrades from those converted by the sound of one’s voice and the strength of one’s arguments.

Despite the opposition of many Bay Area workers and their unions are to fracking they are finding, much to their dismay, that their pension funds are being invested in the fossil fuel industry.

Even though many Bay Area unions are opposed to fracking their pension funds continue to invest money in the companies carrying out this work. It is a problem they are trying to solve.

“[Right-to-work] is going to bring everybody down,” said Russ Krings, the directing business representative for the Milwaukee union International Association of Machinists District 10, during a press conference with other labor leaders on Monday. “It’s going to affect not only the union families and nonunion families. It’s going to affect all the businesses that we go and spend our money at. This is going to bring the economy down."

The longtime New York Times labor reporter on the state of the American labor movement and labor journalism.

Because their traditional allies from the Democratic Party have obsessively embraced corporate-motivated innovations, teacher unions seem paralyzed, unable to respond with a new strategy. They criticize the overuse of standardized tests, but they keep electing Democrats to office who, once elected, more often than not join the corporate attack on education.