Portside

Japanese activists have launched their own Fight for $15 movement, calling for a national minimum wage of 1500 yen per hour. The activists were inspired by the US movement, but also many of them were moved to get involved in social justice work after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. The movement wants to raise wages but also build a broader movement to counter the growing right-wing and anti-immigrant forces in Japan.

The number of voluntary departures in manufacturing has outpaced the number of layoffs fairly consistently since 2011 and the gap between quits and layoffs is now the widest since 2007.

Unions must maintain unity among the workforce split by the Carrier deal, and educate its members on why they should not have voted for Trump. Election data seems to indicate that it was union white workers more than poor white workers who supported Trump to begin with. The divide between highly skilled and paid workers and minimum wage workers harkens back to the 1920s when unions focused primarily on craft workers rather than the expanding industrial workforce.

Tom Juravich, interim Labor Center director, said the university will restore up to six teaching assistant positions that had before been in jeopardy. In addition, the university will support up to 12 graduate student externships, which will now be called internships.

At the top of Representative Virginia Foxx's agenda is the U.S. Labor Department rule that would extend mandatory overtime pay to more than 4 million workers. A federal judge in Texas blocked the rule last month before it took effect, but the Labor Department has challenged that ruling in a federal appeals court.

The author says Hillary Clinton talked about the working class constantly. She had plans to help coal miners and steelworkers. She had plans to help those getting out of prison get jobs. She promoted clean energy jobs and spoke of the dignity of manufacturing jobs. The author argues that white Trump voters might just have been more interested in his attacks against Muslims and Hispanics.

The environmental movement has somehow become synonymous with elite technocratic liberalism. That doesn’t have to be the case.

From local to local, the labor movement needs to transform into an effective machine for fighting the Right.

The future of digital capitalism is before the European Court of Justice, and their decision will affect the future of companies such as Airbnb or Foodora.

Frank Rosen, longtime labor leader and political activist, died Nov. 28 in Chicago. Rosen took part in many of the seminal moments in Chicago history, from studying nuclear physics under Enrico Fermi, to fighting to defend civil liberties in the McCarthy era, to the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, to electing Harold Washington as mayor, all while helping thousands of members of his union struggle for decent wages, benefits and dignity on the job.