Portside

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.

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

San Francisco and Oakland pass minimum wage propositions.

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

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.

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?