Portside

By all accounts, the strike is a bottom-up rebellion. It was organized by rank-and-file teachers, with state teachers’ unions scrambling to catch up.

Women journalist face an unacceptable scale of violence and abuse around the world. Unions are campaigning to draw attention to the failure of government and employers to deal with these human rights abuses.

Frontier Communications workers throughout West Virginia are on strike after the Communication Workers of America and Frontier Communications could not come to an agreement for a new contract with CWA 142. The previous contract expired on March 3.

Teachers' unions say that charter schools, freed from many of the rules that govern traditional public schools, will divert funding from those schools while being free to pay teachers less, eliminate benefits, and kick out under-performing students.

We must get the language right. In reality, this was a strike and movement organized outside the union apparatus. This strike took shape as it did because the existing unions had neither the credibility nor legal authority to represent the workers.  West Virginia teachers and school workers have no collective bargaining, nor the right to strike.

Nobody would call RoseAnn DeMoro, who transformed the California Nurses Association into one of the state’s most powerful political forces and a national player, retiring. But on Sunday, she will retire from the organization she has led for 32 years, saying she leaves the union “100 percent” ready to fight its battles.

The Labor Movement Should Follow Their Lead.

Employers use lockouts to weaken unions. Lockouts sabotage the functioning of the union-management relationship, and they undermine standard and secure jobs in favour of more precariousness. Lockouts are also sometimes used to shift production from one plant or country to another, as well as to close unionized plants.

University of Illinois graduate student workers went on strike Monday after last-minute negotiations over the weekend failed to end a protracted contract dispute that has lasted nearly a year.

Union organizers in states like Tennessee are hoping to change that. Since 2010, the number of union members in Tennessee has grown from 115,000 to 155,000. Still, only 5.7 percent of Tennessee workers are members of a union.How To Patrick Green, even one new member is a big deal. Green is a president of Local 1235, which is part of the Amalgamated Transit Union in Nashville, Tennessee. In the three years that he has been leading the union, the local’s membership rate went up by 36 percent, despite being in a right-to-work state.