Portside

Appeals Court rules NLRB cannot require employers to post notices informing employees of their labor rights. The decision, which comes less than three weeks after lack of regulatory enforcement led to a fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas that killed 14 and left about 200 injured, opens the door for businesses to challenge requirements that workers be informed of their health, safety and employment rights.

The details of U.S.-North Korean relations are complex, the story is relatively simple. The U.S. government continues to reject possibilities for normalizing relations with North Korea and promoting peace on the Korean peninsula in favor of a dangerous policy of regime change. And, the U.S. media supports this policy choice with a deliberately one sided presentation of events designed to make North Korea appear to be an unwilling and untrustworthy negotiating partner.

Eight people were killed when a fire swept through a clothing factory in Bangladesh on Wednesday, as the death toll from the collapse of another factory building two weeks ago climbed above 900. Meanwhile, multinational corporations are coming under growing scrutiny and facing mounting protests over their involvement in the exploitation of Bangladeshi workers. One U.S. union is targeting Gap, Inc.

New York City Council passes historic bill making up to 1 million workers eligible for sick leave.

Not only is this narrative mistaken, but by indulging in it, we are missing a huge opportunity to learn the lessons that Denmark might offer us

". . . our goal is simple, which is always the goal of nonviolent civil disobedience, is to shine the unavoidable moral light on that which is wrong until it is so clear to everyone how people have misused their power." - Rev. William Barber, President, North Carolina NAACP.

A co-author of a new Heritage Foundation study highly critical of the Senate’s bipartisan immigration proposal also wrote a doctoral dissertation in which he argued that immigrants generally had an I.Q. that was “substantially lower than that of the white native population.”

These fast food campaigns, and the recent strike wave against Wal-Mart, represent the most dramatic challenges by the embattled U.S. labor movement to two industries that increasingly define the new U.S. economy.