Portside

Newly armed with the right to collective bargaining, teaching assistants, graduate assistants, and research assistants at private universities are organizing to join the ranks of the unionized.

For now, it will be up to states and cities to protect workers.

Well over 150,000 miners lost their lives in the late 19th and early 20th century, more than in most wars in US history. Mother Jones would have argued that the problem was that the needs of the industry are prevailing above the needs of the earth and its people. For her and radicals of her generation, thinking of natural resources as belonging to the public was the great collective objection to the plunder for private gain.

Not only are Trump's cabinet appointments redolent with some of the worst elements in corporate America, but several have backgrounds that suggest they would move to decimate more than a century of legal protections for federal civil service employees, starting with instituting what would be in effect loyalty tests to gauge worker attitudes in light of proposed slavish pro-business accommodations by agency heads of the incoming administration.

As their membership and resources have continued to dwindle, unions are trying to figure out how best to respond to the current moment. With a Trump inauguration fast approaching and the Republicans taking control of the Supreme Court, the United States Congress, a majority of governorships, and over two-thirds of state legislatures, this choice has become even more urgent than it already was.

After a stern message to the dancers from their own union, the American Guild of Variety Artists, reminding them of the terms of their contracts and that refusal to perform at Trump's inauguration could result in termination, both the employer and the union have issued new statements. However, the AGVA emphasized the original compulsory contract terms by saying the there was no room for politics in the workplace.

The Fuyao plant in Ohio illustrates changing trends in U.S. manufacturing jobs, which are beginning to resemble jobs in the fast food and retail sectors. While manufacturing is still popularly associated with living wages and competitive benefits, one-third of the families of frontline factory workers are now forced to go on public assistance due to substandard pay and benefits...

One month after at least 28 workers lost their lives at a shipbreaking facility, little has changed. And until the government of Pakistan shows the political will to institute radical reforms to protect the lives and improve the wages of underpaid shipbreaking workers, little will change.

Forty years ago, shop workers in Britain developed the Lucas Plan to save jobs by converting arms manufacturing to industrial production. The struggle for economic conversion, and against the deskilling of work through computer-controlled technology remains relevant today in the search for solutions to the environmental crisis and the employment crisis.

In the face of Trump and the GOP’s likely nationwide attack on unions, labor leaders are scrambling to ensure that they have a hand in reshaping a Democratic Party that has, as union power has diminished, sometimes pushed organized labor to the margins. Union members make up about 100 of the roughly 447 voting members of the Democratic National Committee, making union support a major factor in the race for DNC chair.