Portside

As labor unions across much of the world struggle to increase their membership, how do workers get their employers to raise wages and assure safe conditions? That’s the question some of the world’s most innovative worker groups are asking. And they’re hopeful they have found a solution.

Union leaders say they take sexual harassment seriously. In addition to expanding staff training and counseling as needed, SEIU has established additional channels through which employees can report potential issues. At its executive council meeting in March, the AFL-CIO approved a new, stronger code of conduct and a new process for addressing issues like sexual harassment and requiring its state and local affiliates to do the same.

Greg Asbed has been honored for his work co-founding the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and helping develop the Worker-driven Social Responsibility model, or WSR, a bottom-up approach in which workers play a key role in establishing work condition standards.

Tip theft and other forms of wage theft is already a serious problem, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. It estimated workers lost more than $50 billion a year in wage theft in 2014, or far more than the cost of robberies, burglaries and other property crimes.

Acting on the principle "All of us or none," delegates to the AFL-CIO Convention joined Black Lives Matter protesters outside the meeting hall.

Reporters and editors at the commonly owned New York news sites DNAinfo and Gothamist are now represented by the Writers Guild of America East.

These Americans face growing competition from abroad.

The authors challenge the popular view of Leave voters as those left behind educationally and financially. They explain why it is individuals from an intermediate class, whose financial position has been declining, that represent an important section of the Brexit vote.

One of the most transparent union-busting provisions of Iowa’s new collective bargaining law has failed to significantly reduce the number of workers covered by the state’s two largest public-sector unions: the Iowa State Education Association and AFSCME Council 61.

The talk during the upcoming convention, according to Paff, will focus on winning strong contracts, converting part-time jobs into full-time work, boosting wages that start for some at $11 an hour and protecting pensions that have been under attack.