Portside

In the past, unions sometimes shied away from knocking down systematic injustices, especially with regard to race. Not anymore. This is not the labor movement from last century. We will not sit on the sidelines. #FREEAMERICA is committed to joining others who are on the ground, doing the work to fix our broken criminal justice system. We are committed to standing with workers who are already in our schools standing between young people and the criminal justice system.

To accommodate workers’ tight schedules, “we had to be creative,” said Rodríguez. Trainings took place after work, often in the nearby Laundry Worker Center office, with small groups of six to eight workers, sometimes running from 8 p.m. to 3 a.m.

From sufism to reggae, from construction work to driving taxis, it has been a colorful ride for one of the co-founders of a taxi drivers union in New York.

The District’s move is the latest in a series of unexpected and rapid-fire victories for the $15-minimum-wage movement. What began as an audacious push by fast-food workers just a few years ago is evolving into a new labor standard, with state lawmakers in California and New York agreeing to implement a $15 minimum wage by 2022 and legislatures in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Jersey weighing similar measures.

Movement of Rank-and-File Educators (MORE) earns an important foothold for an emerging rank-and-file challenger at New York City's United Federation of Teachers (UFT).

The decision is extremely important. Especially since the 1981 PATCO air traffic controllers strike – when President Ronald Reagan fired all the controllers, who struck over safety issues, and permanently replaced them – employers routinely fire striking workers and bring in “permanent replacements,” or threaten to, sometimes even before a strike begins.

In the public sector, neoliberal, market oriented reforms have been the order of the day in Norway ever since the 1980s – regardless of what kind of government we have had. Increased control from above and increased demand for loyalty to management have contributed to undermining working conditions and workers’ control of their own work. Resistance against this development is slowly emerging.

It’s been five years since self-styled education reformer Michelle Rhee left her job as head of the District of Columbia Public Schools under a cloud of bitterness and controversy, but she is still throwing shade over the Washington city school system.

At the end of March, soccer players Carli Lloyd, Becky Sauerbrunn, Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe, and Hope Solo went public. They filed a federal complaint accusing U.S. Soccer of wage discrimination. They earned significantly less money—roughly a quarter less, according to the complaint—despite dramatically outperforming the men’s national team, and despite producing nearly $20 million more in revenue for U.S. Soccer than what the men’s team brought in.

The strike and union campaign at Klein Management are part of a larger movement among indigenous Mexican farm workers, which is sweeping through the whole Pacific coast. Work stoppages by Triqui and Mixteco blueberry pickers have hit Sakuma Farms in Burlington, Washington, for the past three years. Workers there organized an independent union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, and launched a boycott of Driscoll's, the world's largest berry distributor.