Portside

Cablevision workers from Brooklyn, invited by the National Action Network to perform at the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, took the stage with their latest rap, "Dear Mr. Dolan: Where The Papers At?" It's a call for fairness from the company that has refused to bargain a fair contract for the 280 workers.

In a press release after the end of the Congress, Alexis Tsipras stated: “The founding Congress of SYRIZA constitutes a big step, a historical landmark for the Greek Left and for democracy. Approximately 3500 delegates from all over Greece sealed the birth of the new political subject. With an open and lively democratic debate. ...To stop social destruction and rebuild Greece”.

To reverse organized labor's decline and to rebuild the left requires either reviving the old New Deal coalition or forming a new comparably powerful alliance. That means confronting and outwitting the long demonization of unions and the left....More importantly, it requires a strategy to reposition labor unions and their allies as champions of broad social gains for the 99%.

The administration is about to launch a ferocious propaganda blitz that will engulf a wide range of U.S. media. And as a fallback, the president is reserving the option of attacking Syria no matter what Congress does.

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

There are few things more bizarre than watching people advocate that another country be bombed even while acknowledging that it will achieve no good outcomes other than safeguarding the "credibility" of those doing the bombing. Relatedly, it's hard to imagine a more potent sign of a weak, declining empire than having one's national "credibility" depend upon periodically bombing other countries.

The priority has to be jobs now, rather than any deficit reduction. On top of lowering unemployment, policy should also restore the bargaining power of low- and middle-wage workers. This means aggressively increasing the minimum wage; it means reestablishing the right to collective bargaining for higher wages; it means guestworkers should have full rights to the same labor market protections as resident workers; it means paying attention to job quality and wage growth.

As the ACLU has documented in Victims of Complacency, while the fate of the men may be unique, the scheme of which they were a part was sadly all too common at the time. Since 2003, similar labor trafficking schemes resulted in thousands of foreign workers (known as Third Country Nationals or "TCNs") being hired to work on U.S. government contracts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.