Portside

Latino workers, demanding respect in a precarious job environment, helped boost the state's unionized workforce by 100,000 in 2012.

The US Court of Appeals, in Washington DC, issued a decision declaring the recess appointments Pres. Obama made to the NLRB in Jan. 2012 are unconstitutional.

Like most new organizing in the private sector, decades of attempts to unionize Walmart stores in the U.S. and Canada have been met with firings, outsourcing, and even closings.

Leo Robinson was a leader of the longshore union in San Francisco. He died this week. For many of us, he was an example of what being an internationalist and a working-class activist was all about.

As Facebook and Twitter become as central to workplace conversation as the company cafeteria, federal regulators are ordering employers to scale back policies that limit what workers can say online.

PARIS — French labor unions and business leaders struck a deal to overhaul labor laws. The changes include more flexibility for employers to reduce hours to prevent lay offs in times of "economic distress." Employers will pay a higher tax for using temporary labor. In exchange for flexibility, unions secured improvements to unemployment benefits and health insurance, as well as seats on the board of large companies.

City council passes "wage theft" law that threatens license of violating companies. Will other cities follow?

Teachers unions and other educational service workers across the country - in New York, Seattle, and Hawaii - are fighting against further cuts in school budgets, for better quality education for their students. In New York, school bus drivers prepare to strike for job security for trained professional drivers; in Seattle, teachers vote to refuse to give standardized tests; in Hawaii teachers campaign for a penny tax increase dedicated to education.

Employer-created wellness programs are about what workers should do on their own time, not what the employer could do to stop making them sick at work...Wellness programs are growing fast. In firms with more than 200 workers, 94 percent had such programs in 2012

The passage of a so-called "right-to-work" law in Michigan recently left the labor movement feeling gut-punched. AlterNet talks with Stephen Lerner, Jonathan Westin, Ruth Milkman, Bill Fletcher Jr., Jane McAlevey, Eric Robertson & Ben Speight for their suggestions on how labor can go on the offensive in the next year. Amy Dean, former president of the South Bay (CA) AFL-CIO Labor Council looks at best & worst developments of 2012 in the labor and social movements.