Portside

People say that the restaurant industry in Portland is incestuous – that everyone’s worked with everyone else – but that’s because people keep switching jobs in search of the mythical balance of tips to hours to number of shifts to physical demand.

Netflix offers its employees as much as one year of paid time off to new mothers and fathers.

The UAW is back in bargaining with the Big 3 Automakers. Will they end the two-tier wage and benefit system they agreed to 8 years ago? And if they do, can they end it by raising up the bottom tier, rather than taking cuts for the top tier?

Why Are Urban Teachers Being Trained to be Robots? As my students entered the room, I was supposed to say: "In seats, zero talking, page 6, questions, 1-4." But I don't even talk to my dog like that. Constant narration of what the students are doing is also key to the NNN teaching style. "Noel is is finishing question 3. Marjorie is sitting silently. Alfredo is on page 6."

Before winning over AFL-CIO, she hopes to gain backing of individual unions.

The policy shortens the timespan from when the board approves a union's request for a workplace organizing election to when that election is held to as little as 11 days. Previously, the process often took one to two months. The board formally announced the rule in December and it went into effect April 14.

When farmworkers migrate, they carry with them their organizing experience and transnational networks—and a powerful potential for cross-pollinating fights. Recent struggles in Baja California, Washington State, Vermont and Ontario all demonstrate the power of those connections.

"This ruling that overturns city pension cuts and protects the life savings of city workers is a win for all Chicago," AFSCME Council 31 executive director Roberta Lynch said. "All city residents can be reassured that the Constitution--our state's highest law--means what it says and will be respected, while city employees and retirees can be assured that their modest retirement income is protected."

There is nothing new about Northern factories moving to the south for lower labor costs, but starting in the 1960s, higher value manufacturing made the shift and had a more profound impact on the economy, reducing the economic divide. Meanwhile, the political divide between North and South has deepened, and the South has attempted to impose on the rest of the nation its opposition to worker and minority rightst-hrough the vehicle of a Southernized Republican Party.

Eight years after accepting a drastic two-tier system of wages and benefits—and nearly a decade since the first tier got a raise—the United Auto Workers are bargaining with the Big 3 automakers.