Portside

Jane McAlevey on Fight for 15, labor’s crisis of strategy, and the difference between organizing and mobilizing.

A U.S. farm worker and a horticultural assistant have filed lawsuits claiming Monsanto Co.'s Roundup herbicide caused their cancers and Monsanto intentionally misled the public and regulators about the dangers of the herbicide.

A trial of shorter days for nurses at a Gothenburg care home is inspiring others across Scandinavia to cut back, but the cost of improving staff well being is high.

Many UAW members said they voted against the proposed contract because of fear of plant closures and because it failed to provide entry-level workers with a full path to the $28-per-hour average wage that workers hired before 2007 make..

Foreign workers are brought to the United States by outsourcing companies and copy how the employees of Toys "R" Us do their jobs. The jobs are then sent to India and the employees are given pink slips.

NEA state officials and rank-and-file members plan to protest upcoming vote to endorse Hillary Clinton.

Puerto Rico is in a severe economic crisis. The Partido del Pueblo Trabajador (PPT) was founded in 2010 to build a movement to combat austerity and the fundamental roots of the crisis: Since 1898 when the United States took Puerto Rico from Spain, the movement and shape of Puerto Rico’s economy have been largely determined by the priorities and preferences of U.S. capital. The PPT unites electoral work with movement building with the goal of radical change.

Seattle teachers went on strike for a week this month with a list of goals for a new contract. By the time the strike officially ended this week, teachers had won some of the usual stuff of contract negotiations — for example, the first cost-of-living raises in six years — but also less standard objectives.

Autoworker expectations for the 2015 UAW/Big Three contracts were to end the lower-tier wage that the union agreed first agreed to in 2007, at the time of the economic crisis. Over the last decade the higher-tier workers lost four dollars an hour to inflation and have been looking for a raise, and perhaps a restoration of the Cost-of-Living-Adjustment (COLA) that had been suspended.

Walking with eyes wide open into the ranks of labor is a necessity. An informed approach is critical. Learning about the history, the limitations and the possibilities of a revitalized labor—or labour—movement becomes part of the tool kit for workers crafting novel approaches to challenge their working conditions. Knowledge is a form of power.