Portside

The manufacturing industry has been hit hard since China's acceptance in the World Trade Organization. The industry includes imports of computer and electronic parts and accounted for 56 percent of the $240.1 billion increase in the US trade deficit with China. An estimated 1,249,100 jobs were eliminated in the electronic industry.

Agustin Morales was fired from his job as a Massachusetts public school teacher after being elected president of his union and after he participated in collective protest against an element of education reform. Here is the story of how community groups, parents and other teacher union activists came together to support him and help him win his job back.

Agustin Morales was fired from his job as a Massachusetts public school teacher after being elected president of his union and after he participated in collective protest against an element of education reform. Here is the story of how community groups, parents and other teacher union activists came together to support him and help him win his job back.

Op-Ed by food journalist and columnist Mark Bittman: "What makes this an exciting time is that we are beginning to see links among issues that we have overlooked for far too long."

In a turn-around decision, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that employees can use their workplace email to organize a union. The Supreme Court continued it's pro-business agenda by ruling that Amazon can detain workers at the end of their shift to search them, and they do not have to pay them for the time it takes.

Indian unions protest government plans for massive privatization and deregulation in the name of more ‘flexible’ labour laws that will impact precarious and unprotected workers particularly hard. The proposed changes, which will bring down social standards and social indicators, have been developed without any form of consultation or dialogue with labour unions whatsoever.

Unions historically have supported minimum wage and occupational safety laws that benefited all workers, not just their members. But they also have recently begun investing major resources in organizing drives more likely to yield new laws than new members. Some of these campaigns seek to organize workers who, rightly or wrongly, aren't even designated as employees or lack a common employer, such as domestic workers and cab drivers.

The Silicon Valley-based network Shareable dispatched Nathan Schneider to write a report on the growing movement to experiment with new forms of economic democracy online. Schneider states that "A popular mantra among sharing-economy boosters has been "sharing is the new owning." What I found is the opposite." Given concerns about the sharing economy, Schneider examined cooperatives, networks of freelancers, cryptocurrencies, and more.

“Non-competes (agreements) create a Balkanized labor force where you’re not a sandwich maker, but either a Jimmy John’s or Subway sandwich maker. Workers, in other words, are being forced to pledge fealty to companies that can still fire them at will. The payoff, of course, is that workers who, practically-speaking, can’t switch jobs are workers who can’t ask for raises.”

Campaigns for social control of capital look different from social democratic movements that began in the 1870s and endured through the mid-1960s. Thus many underestimate the significance of the Occupy Movement, the mobilization of domestic workers, immigrants, restaurant and fast food workers, home healthcare workers, self-employed women workers, tomato pickers or the landless. Nonetheless, we should recognize that these campaigns all challenge capital.