Portside

In recent months, regulators have demanded millions of dollars from companies that hired independent contractors to hang drywall, install cable, staff call centers, give manicures and perform other jobs in which the government said workers were really functioning as company employees.

The AFL-CIO held a closed-door executive council meeting last week. The mood at the meeting, one AFL-CIO top staffer said, was that the future of the labor movement was at risk if they continued "business as usual."

The latest skirmish in an escalating battle between ver.di, one of the largest unions in Germany, and Amazon, which employs 8,000 permanent workers at eight distribution centers in the country, one of the online retailer’s largest markets outside the United States. Deservedly or not, Amazon’s labor relations have lately come under intense scrutiny by German media.

Former leaders of the Labor Party have set-up a web site to discuss the legacy and lessons of the Labor Party, founded in 1996.

"The A.F.L.-C.I.O., the nation’s largest federation of unions, has issued an apparent endorsement of the Keystone XL oil pipeline," writes Steven Greenhouse in the NY Times. Following the NY Times' article, Portside gives you the federation's official statement followed by the official AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department's unequivocal interpretation of the AFL-CIO Executive Council's decision.

Employees at Weight Watchers earn very low wages while working for a very profitable corporation.

Growing income inequality—approaching now obscene levels—is not simply a ‘moral outrage’. It not only represents a gross violation of historically held American values or reasonable equality for all. It is a condition that has served, and continues to serve, as a major cause of the lack of sustained economic recovery in the US now for five years—as well as a major factor in explaining why the US continues today to drift toward another ‘double dip’ recession.

Membership has plummeted and once-powerful groups have lost clout as conservative governments oppose worker activism.

Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis successfully tapped into the wrath of frustrated members and took on Mayor Rahm Emanuel last September when she led the city's first teachers strike in 25 years. On Tuesday, a group of union members said Lewis didn't leverage the strike to get enough from the district — including a guarantee not to close schools — and announced a slate of candidates that will try to unseat Lewis and her team in a regular election set for May

Foxconn has announced that workers will be able to vote for union representatives at their factories. The plan, according to news reports, is to allow workers to elect “junior workers” to represent them in a union leadership structure historically dominated by management and officials.