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.

India's Intellectual Property Appellate Board allows license for generic cancer drug at fraction of cost of Bayer's.

The Oscars - stories in the news and not, behind the headlines, what the mainstream media missed; Brooklyn’s racist and gay-hating Assemblyman Dov Hilkind parties in blackface; how to deal with a homophobic preacher

On Friday at midnight, the sequester kicked in, triggering $85 billion in deep, dumb budget cuts that sent “nonessential personnel”— such as air traffic controllers — packing.

After the last presidential ballot - which Chávez won with the same percentage he did his first election yet with a greatly expanded electorate - even his opponents have admitted, despairingly, that a majority of Venezuelans liked, if not adored, the man.

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."

Both Trumka and Communications Workers (CWA) President Larry Cohen, who heads the federation’s organizing committee, said on Tuesday that the goal was not just gaining new members or better contracts, important as they may be. Rather, Cohen said, labor would try to “connect the dots” among causes—such as immigrant rights, worker rights, campaign and voting reform—to build a mass movement for a strong democracy at work and in the public arena.

With the Dow Jones industrial average flirting with a record high, the split between American workers and the companies that employ them is widening and could worsen in the next few months as federal budget cuts take hold.