Portside

"The term “union” is a dirty word in some circles, even in this city, where labor still has considerable clout and has catapulted many workers into the middle class. But no one can deny that these union workers savor something that is all too rare in the retail industry right now: guaranteed minimum hours — for part-time and full-time employees — and predictable schedules."

Thousands of fast food workers across 150 U.S. cities walked off the job on Thursday. Hundreds of those workers — nearly 500 of them, according to a public relations firm supporting the strikes — willfully committed civil disobedience as part of their protest, and were subsequently arrested by the police.

Peasant associations, unionists, left-wing parties and anti-racist groups launch a solidarity campaign in Greece following a summer which saw a court set free the men who shot strawberry pickers in Greece the previous year. Thirty-five workers, most from Bangladesh, were injured in the shooting, four of them critically. They had been asking for unpaid back wages. Most migrant farm workers in Greece are without legal papers.

Fast food workers are planning to hold civil disobedience actions on Thursday calling for a $15 an hour wage.

Most liberals continue to pay lip service to unions and their importance to the Democratic coalition. But in private, many will tell you that they have little use for them. Julian Zelizer, a Princeton political economist, argues that the marriage between liberalism and organized labor “took a terrible turn starting in the 1970s,” when global competition moved manufacturing jobs from the unionized Northeast and Midwest to the non-union South and, ultimately, abroad.

A new report suggests that union membership has increased in New York City and State, particularly in the private sector.

Virtually all labor organizations face the expanded challenge of recruiting and maintaining members in already unionized workplaces where the decision to provide financial support for the union has, for better or worse, become voluntary.

Two provocative articles on our upcoming Labor Day, by Bill Fletcher and Maynard Seider

Trade union delegates to the US-Africa summit stressed that economic ties and growth are not enough. They stressed that there needs to be "a more complex view of development," that addresses the issue of growing inequality. As an example, delegates noted that it is not enough to talk about job creation, attention must also be paid to the kind of jobs being created.

27,000 home health care workers vote to unionize and join the Service Employees International Union. This is one of the largest organizing efforts in Minnesota since the great depression.