Portside

IndustriALL Global Union marked a historic moment as Mexican union leader, Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, returned to his country after 12 years in exile to be sworn in as senator, in a ceremony in Mexico City on 29 August.

“This has been a terrible 18 months-plus for working people in this country,” said Celine McNicholas, director of labor law and policy at the Economic Policy Institute. “It’s an unprecedented attack on workers.”

The labor movement has suffered constant attacks and a demoralizing decline. But labor unions were in bad shape in the 1920s and came back. What can we learn from history?

Teachers and education workers in Los Angeles, the second largest school district in the country (after New York), voted 98 percent to 2 percent to authorize their first strike in nearly 30 years.

However, five U.S. union leaders noted in a statement that “there is more work that needs to be done to deliver the needed, real solutions to NAFTA’s deeply ingrained flaws.”

The national unemployment rate hit 3.8 percent in May and companies across the country are complaining about the difficulty of finding workers. Yet Amazon has been able to staff its warehouses with low-paid part-time workers.

Are you pissed off about the recent attacks against public employee unions? Are you disturbed by the continuation of literal slavery in the prison system? This Labor Day weekend take it to the barricades!

Unions must either demand a place at the table or be part of the meal

As we approach the ten year anniversary of the great recession, leading economists talk about where the next crisis might come from. Workers bear the brunt of crises, but they also could be the cause that provokes the system to falter.

A federal judge in Washington has struck down keys parts of President Trump's executive orders that would have made it easier to fire federal employees.