Portside

Mexican Teachers are fighting back against attacks on their wages, benefits and working conditions going under the rubric of "education reform". Massive strikes and protests have already taken place with the possibility of a general strike today.

Recently Richmond CA a majority "minority" city has been in the news with an innovative plan to take on the banks and fight blight and the banks have declared war on the city. Richmond is also the community that has taken on Chevron, and the soda industry, has passed "Ban the Box" and municipal IDs. This article describes the organizing that was critical to making all of this possible.

“We are a small part of the 150 million Americans who work for a living,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in his keynote address Monday at the labor federation's convention in Los Angeles. “We cannot win economic justice only for ourselves, for union members alone. It would not be right and it’s not possible. All working people will rise together, or we will keep falling together.”

Teachers have paralyzed Mexico City in protest of President Nieto's sweeping reform bill, but do they have popular support or political leaders on their side?

Volkswagen is working with the United Automobile Workers at its Chattanooga, Tenn., assembly plant on how to unionize the plant and create a German-style works council there, the president of the labor union said on Friday.

The current crisis facing the public sector, a major location of African American workers, along with the crisis facing organized labor, should present a moment to reconsider old assumptions. A multi-union effort to organize Southern public sector workers could be something close to a game-changer on several levels, not the least being the potential impact on Southern politics and Southern unionization. And, as the saying goes, as goes the South, so goes the USA.

This recent struggle that succeeded in securing a wage increase at Victoria Secret may show that the fight for better wages at fast food stores might be having a ripple effect.

Should the trend of de-unionization continue, it is not unreasonable to wonder whether there will be any American labor movement to speak of in twenty years or so. But that may change. Over the past several months, a new kind of labor activism has emerged from some of America’s poorest-paying and least-unionized industries. Fast food workers have stood near the forefront of the movement, waging a nationwide strike campaign which began in December with about 200 New York-

Two perspectives on Labor Day plus a music video by Cablevision workers fighting for a contract.

ILWU members see turf battles with rival unions as an additional, unwelcome hurdle to surmount, in an already difficult employer battle.