Portside

We need to critically evaluate the concept of waged work. Due to problems associated with underwork, overwork, and non-work, the system of waged labor fails us in many ways.

Nurses at San Francisco General attempt to meet with Mayor Ed Lee about staffing shortages in the busiest emergency room in the city. Nurses have filed 300 official reports in the last two years, detailing unsafe conditions, but there has been no response from hospital management.

In order to destroy public institutions, like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public education and the Post Office, corporate America must first destroy the support they enjoy with the working class. One way to do this is to de-fund them or make them difficult and frustrating to access.

Inside squalid quarters, bedrooms are so crowded that men must sleep three to a stack — one on the upper bunk, one on the lower bunk and one below the lower bunk, separated from the floor by only a thin pad for a mattress. In the space between the beds, the men pile cauliflower, onions and sacks of Basmati rice to cook after working all day and washing the construction dirt from their clothes. Exposed wiring hangs from the ceiling, and cockroaches climb the walls.

New Jersey Governor Christie is reducing pension payments worth $2.43 billion to cover a budget deficit thus threatening the stability of the pension fund. He is walking away from a pension overhaul he signed in his first term. He is being sued by the Communications Workers of America and the New Jersey Education Association.

The sharing economy is growing. AirBNB is now more valuable than Hyatt. But is this an economy built on social justice values and a more sustainable, lower consumption model? Or is it a new way for Big Business to creep further into our lives and exploit our relationships with one another? One professor says about crowdsourcing: "This is a total affront to what the labor movement has struggled for for centuries."

"Workers increasingly serve businesses that do not officially 'employ' the worker — a distinction that hampers organizing, erodes labor standards and dilutes accountability," said Catherine Ruckelshaus, general counsel for the National Employment Law Project, which advocates on behalf of low-wage workers. A recent Federal Reserve study showed that nearly 7.5 million people who are working part time — contract workers included — would rather have full-time jobs.

Cory Booker, Chris Christie, and Mark Zuckerberg had a plan to reform Newark’s schools. They got an education.

After receiving major bribes from Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindall, Chiquita is abandoning Gulfport Miss. for New Orleans. This is another chapter in United Fruit/Chiquita's sorid anti-union history.

Fast food workers from around the world participated in a strike against McDonalds and other low-wage employers in an ongoing struggle to demand a living wage. Meanwhile, strikes erupted in Turkey in reaction to government inaction and possible complicity in a disastrous coal mine explosion that has left hundreds of miners dead.