Portside

On the same day that Bernie Sanders walked the picket line with CWA and IBEW unionists on strike against Verizon, he gained the endorsement on New York's Transit Workers Union. TWU Local 100 president John Samuelsen said, "Bernie Sanders has been fighting against the 'powers that be' in this country on behalf of all American workers his entire life."

Marquette University law professor Paul Secunda said he thinks the legal battle over right to work in the state will eventually be decided by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, where conservatives hold a 5-2 majority. However, Secunda said Wisconsin's right-to-work lawsuit has highlighted "a real free-rider problem" with right to work, and that future lawsuits could raise similar arguments in federal court.

Fed up with inequality, unemployment and labor reforms — and increasingly outraged at the financial and political elite — tens of thousands across France are taking to the streets and the squares.

Under an obscure provision of the city's wage hike, unionized hotels were granted an exemption allowing them to pay their employees less. The result is that some members in the hotel workers union Unite Here, now make less than those doing the same job in non-union workplaces.

Abdel-Al—who lives in occupied East Jerusalem—is visiting Chicago this week at the invitation of the United Electrical Workers (UE), the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, and Jewish Voice for Peace to enlist the support of the U.S. labor movement in the Palestinian liberation struggle. He addressed standing-room-only audiences of rank-and-file unionists at last weekend’s Labor Notes conference and again on Tuesday night at the local UE Hall.

Labor for Bernie believes their candidate can defeat Hillary Clinton for the nomination. But Sanders supporters know that their candidate—even if he wins big in several more states—could have victory wrested from him at the convention. Therefore labor supporters gathered to discuss how to continue the movement into the future, win or lose.

Former Massey Energy Company CEO was sentenced to a year in prison. He was convicted of misdemeanor conspiracy for willfully violating mine safety standards at Upper Big Branch Mine, West Virginia. 29 men died in the explosion in 2010.

The debate this election cycle about how to shore up the American middle class and the longer-term worry that automation will chip away at the labor market both miss a more proximate and pressing reality: knowledge work, including tech jobs, are already being shipped overseas. What happened to manufacturing jobs a generation ago is now being repeated in the knowledge economy, linking the fates of the professional class and the working class together.

Our goal should be a living wage, not zero job loss.

Jane McAlevey is a union organizer and a critic of what is generally thought of as the U.S. “labor reform” movement. In this review of her article, I separate her criticism of labor—which I think has merit—from its attribution to Saul Alinsky—which I find without merit.