Portside

Republicans on and off the bench are moving to kill unions. But millennials—the most pro-union generation since the 1930s—may yet find a way to organize.

Teachers in Oklahoma, Arizona, and Kentucky are now striking, sicking out, rallying, and Facebooking to push officials to raise their salaries and defend their benefits.

Overall membership was up slightly, by 262,000. The increase included 166,000 in the private sector; 96,000 in the public sector.

Big brands have refused for decades to take responsibility for the payment of workers’ settlements when their suppliers close, even though they are often directly responsible for the sustainability of the factories.

Nearly 5,000 JetBlue flight attendants will start voting Monday in an effort to join the Transport Workers Union.

A new collective bargaining law--supported by the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity--requires local unions to prove they represent a majority of the teachers in their districts. The measuring stick? At least half of all employees eligible to be in the union must be paying dues.

The expected anti-union Janus decision is bad news but unlikely to be a disaster for unions and may even be the wake-up call that they need. Janus is the Roman god of transitions, and this may be a big one for the labor movement.

Within the last 10 days, 30,000 Arizona teachers have flooded into their own Facebook group, Arizona Educators United, and begun a series of highly visible actions, sporting their “Red for Ed” T-shirts wherever they go.

Unions give workers the power to improve their workplaces, and have a long history of creating lasting, progressive changes, from the institution of the eight-hour workday to health and safety regulations. Maybe someone in your family — a parent, an aunt or uncle, a grandparent — is in a union.

What also makes the West Virginia Teachers strike similar to other effective acts of solidarity against entrenched right-wing power is that it was borne in the democratic cauldron of public schools.