Portside

Historian Mark Lause discusses an intriguing slice of baseball history, including the Knights of Labor influenced fight for labor rights and against the color bar in baseball. Great even for those who don't associate spring with baseball!

Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis specifically said the union is willing to consider reducing benefits for those who still are working, although she emphatically ruled out changes for members who already have retired. But such compromise wont come until the city and the school board agree to contribute more to pensions each year in order to at least partially make up for a contribution shortfall that occurred during much of the past two decades.

Organizing practice and research have shown that the recruitment and development of grassroots worker leadership is key to winning organizing, contract, and political campaigns. Despite the broad endorsement of leadership-development organizing and a collection of truly inspiring leadership development stories, when asked, worker leaders consistently report varieties of leadership underdevelopment.

New leadership, a Membership Action Team organizing plan, and a 22 month contract campaign that included two strikes, produce a strong bargaining agreement covering 22,000 hospital and campus workers at the University of California. The new contract offers protections against subcontracting, limits on temporary workers, wage increases, and "strong benefits," among other items.

A new book profiles alternative models of labor organizing in New York City, including worker centers and innovative strategies to organize workers in one of the most unequal cities in the country. New Labor in New York, edited by Ruth Milkman and Ed Ott, is now available from Cornell University Press.

Andrew Gross Gaitan, director of the Service Employees International Union's airports division, which supports the measure, said unionized companies could develop labor peace agreements with the unions representing their workers or any other organization or employee committee. Non-unionized companies elsewhere have reached such agreements, he said. Mayor Eric Garcetti, who received $198,000 in contributions from SEIU in the last election, backs the proposal.

While world leaders look for ways to supply a promised $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poorer nations curb their emissions and adapt to climate change, “the poor are already paying the costs with their labour and their time,” said Atiq Rahman, executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies. Two articles highlight serious negative impacts of climate change: on farmers and farmworkers who harvest coffee in Central America, and farmworkers in Nepal.

While world leaders look for ways to supply a promised $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poorer nations curb their emissions and adapt to climate change, “the poor are already paying the costs with their labour and their time,” said Atiq Rahman, executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies. Two articles highlight serious negative impacts of climate change: on farmers and farmworkers who harvest coffee in Central America, and farmworkers in Nepal.

One detail Deutsche Bank didn’t account for when it opened The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas casino: a labor dispute that has reached from Nevada into the bank’s dealings with the Federal Reserve in Washington.

In three recent cases the National Labor Relations Board ordered the re-opening of a facility it said was closed to avoid negotiating with a union; ordered a trucking company to re-hire workers and bargain with their union; and ordered the reinstatement of three non-union packing house workers who struck to protest working conditions.