Portside

Almost every single province in Canada is ruled by a government committed to deep austerity cuts and assaults on workers rights. The tasks seem large, but as with various local labour battles, campaigns like the Fight for $15, and organizations like Iron & Earth, workers are constantly being pulled together in common struggles against common enemies.

Please join us in getting a fighting start on 2017 by making a contribution to Portside. Guaranteed, this contribution will fuel our work to fight back against Trump all year long. If you've already contributed, thank you! If you intended to contribute but haven't yet, please click here to make a contribution now. The Portside moderators contribute their efforts without pay, but your contributions are the life blood that will sustain our daily operations.

The company is doing what’s made sense for years—and what the Bush and Obama administrations made possible.

“As we prepare to fight-back against the forthcoming attacks on working people and our communities under an extremist-run government, we know we must realign our resources and streamline our investments to buttress and broaden our movement to restore economic and democratic opportunity for all families,” said SEIU spokeswoman Sahar Wali.

California appears to be ready to stand up against the Trump agenda. This builds off much of the organizing already taking place in the state, including some strong victories for workers in 2016. (It is worth noting that even white voters vote differently than whites elsewhere - see http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/california-forum/article119870398.html).

Newly armed with the right to collective bargaining, teaching assistants, graduate assistants, and research assistants at private universities are organizing to join the ranks of the unionized.

For now, it will be up to states and cities to protect workers.

Well over 150,000 miners lost their lives in the late 19th and early 20th century, more than in most wars in US history. Mother Jones would have argued that the problem was that the needs of the industry are prevailing above the needs of the earth and its people. For her and radicals of her generation, thinking of natural resources as belonging to the public was the great collective objection to the plunder for private gain.

Not only are Trump's cabinet appointments redolent with some of the worst elements in corporate America, but several have backgrounds that suggest they would move to decimate more than a century of legal protections for federal civil service employees, starting with instituting what would be in effect loyalty tests to gauge worker attitudes in light of proposed slavish pro-business accommodations by agency heads of the incoming administration.

As their membership and resources have continued to dwindle, unions are trying to figure out how best to respond to the current moment. With a Trump inauguration fast approaching and the Republicans taking control of the Supreme Court, the United States Congress, a majority of governorships, and over two-thirds of state legislatures, this choice has become even more urgent than it already was.