Portside

Low wages is hurting the bottom line at employers like Walmart and Kohls. Raising wages at these retailers might not only help the workers but the retailers themselves.

Tens of thousands of miners began their strike nearly a month ago, but it wasn't until this week that other sectors, including health workers, joined in. Also participating were some workers from Colombia's three most powerful labor federations, whose members oversee such unions as teachers and oil workers.

Unions are strongly backing march in Washington, DC this Saturday to mark 50th anniversary of 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. March is supported by wide array of civil rights, religious organizations, women's groups, and others. Read how different unions are mobilizing; radio interview with William P. Jones - Fifty Years Later, Commemorating and Learning from One of the Great Moments in History; 1963 March Organizing Manual.

We have identified eight principles to building a culture of unionism. By no means is this an exhaustive list, nor is it limited to use in the South. To be honest, it's of use any place where the idea of the collective development and exercise of power has waned:

Book Review and Interview: Jennifer Silva's "Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty." In 100 in-depth, in-person interviews, she found a new working-class adult “bewildered in the labor market, betrayed by institutions, distrustful of love, disconnected from others, and committed to emotional growth.”

Service Employees International Union President Mary Kay Henry believes fast food workers will massively increase their campaign within a few weeks.

Today, the AFL-CIO is seeking to arrest labor's decline through its Working America affiliate, which is a groundbreaking effort at large-scale community organizing, and has some as yet undefined alliance with such other progressive groups as the Sierra Club and the NAACP.

Negotiations between BART and Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555 and Service Employees International Union Local 1021 began months ago, but the two sides remained tens of millions of dollars apart on wages, pensions and health care benefits last week.

The fast food strikes could be the embryo of a new labor movement that challenges the power of organized money and the skyrocketing inequality that has made the American middle class an endangered species.

The Workers Defense Project, founded in 2002, has emerged as one of the nation's most creative organizations for immigrant workers.