Portside

Elijah Armstrong, an organizer with the National Education Association, talks about Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and the push to privatize schools.

Workers are also frustrated that they are being asked to pay more of their health-insurance costs, he added, and that changes in retail workers’ commissions have limited or reduced their take-home pay. As part of its next contract, the union wants to bar AT&T from changing its commission structure unilaterally.

That millions of workers worldwide become "losers" in the process of globalization, should not surprise anyone. Nor that many react with mistrust and blind rebellion. That part of the working class – lacking left political parties with strategies to address this crisis -- are attracted by the extreme right’s verbal anti-establishment rhetoric, is against this background understandable. To understand, however, is not the same as to accept, let alone support.

The working class constitutes roughly 63 percent of the U.S. labor force. Crucially, it consists of both men and women and is multiracial and multiethnic.2 White people are, of course, a big part of the working class, but if we settle on “the white working class” as a class in itself, and with the force of white supremacy, even a class for itself, we lose track of the role blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and other non-whites play in the working class.

The complaint is part of a lengthy battle over the NLRB's recognition of the vote by roughly 160 skilled workers at VW's Chattanooga plant in Tennessee to be represented by the United Auto Workers union. The German automaker has argued against allowing a small group within the plant to have union representation, maintaining that all 1,500 hourly workers should be treated as one unit.

What is the impact of “Buy American” fervor? Chris Brooks interviews Dana Frank, author of Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism, about the history and impact of these campaigns.

The vote does not trigger a strike but does allow the staff's representatives in collective bargaining to call a walkout at any time.

Job insecurity or job discrimination based on class, gender or race, is bad for your health. It is a perversity of work that the language of ‘risks and rewards’ is used to justify soaring boardroom pay packets and the growing income inequality at work. But the workers most frequently compelled to take genuine risks – to life, to limb, to health – are those who receive the lowest financial rewards.

Workers at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance say they were driven to form a union after Rabbi Marvin Hier, the center’s founder and dean, gave the benediction at Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony in January

Records make clear the Bradley Foundation no longer simply favors groups promoting its signature issues: taxpayer-funded school choice and increased work requirements for welfare recipients. It now regularly funds nonprofits that are, among other things, hostile to labor unions, skeptical of climate change or critical of the loosening of sexual mores in American culture.