Portside

Bob White played an historic role in building working class understanding of key principles: the need for workers to control their own class institutions; the need to maintain an understanding of the conflict of interests between workers and employers, the need to maintain a capacity to collectively struggle and resist, a rejection of competitiveness as a goal or concessions as a strategy, and the need for unions to develop an independent political capacity.

The last time adjunct instructors recieved a wage increase was 25 years ago. They celebrated that long ago event with a party that included a cake.

The new law bans public employee unions in most cases from negotiating over issues such as health insurance, evaluation procedures, staff reduction and leaves of absence for political purposes. Police officers and firefighters are exempted from that portion of the law, a move that AFSCME argues in the lawsuit violates the Iowa Constitution by creating "favored" and "disfavored" groups of government workers.

About 39,000 Minnesota workers suffer from wage theft each year, resulting in $11.9 million in wages owed, and that's only what goes reported. The union-backed Wage Theft Initiative proposes policy changes to give the state Department of Labor and Industry more enforcement tools and an increased budget.

On Tuesday, over 15,000 U.S. bank workers with the Spain-based bank Santander will declare their intent to establish this country's first bank workers' union. They'll deliver petitions, take over corporate lobbies and begin the long struggle to bring collective bargaining to an industry with predatory practices and lots of low-wage workers.

The union defeat at a South Carolina Boeing plant was devastating, but it wasn't inevitable. Labor can still organize the South.

Immigrant rights activists have developed a strategy to defeat deportations. Those arrested are encouraged to refuse to sign the “voluntary departure," and insist upon having legal counsel. All persons inside the U.S. have a right to counsel (not only citizens). If some 20%- 30% of those arrested begin to refuse to sign, the jails will fill within days – even the private prisons. If those arrested insist on legal counsel, the courts will be overloaded.

Several thousand public school teachers in Honolulu packed the grounds of the state Capitol on Monday as part of a rally calling on the governor and lawmakers to increase funding for public schools and raise teacher salaries

"If the American labor movement thinks that we can just go out there and start and control the organizing that takes place, we’re not going to be successful," says Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. "I think what we can do is create an environment in which organizing takes place... We have to think of ourselves less as an institution, and more as a movement."

A bill proposed in the Republican controlled state legislature in Iowa will make it illegal for all public employees except “public safety employees” (police and fire) to negotiate over health care, transfers, job evaluations, procedures for workforce reductions, subcontracting, or anything related to seniority.