Portside

Long time labor editor, writer and activist dies.

As pseudo-stateless workers, guest workers face all of the obstacles confronting any U.S. workers who try to organize, and then some.

Duke faculty, alongside professors from North Carolina Central University, North Carolina State University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, held an eight-person panel discussion, “Save Our State: Scholars Speak Out on North Carolina’s New Direction,” titled to address issues including health, environmental and educational polices in a Republican-dominated North Carolina state government.

"If you don't have anybody following you," Cecil Roberts, president of the UMWA said at the rally, "you're not a leader; you're just taking a walk. When we walk out of this building today I'm going to be a leader because there is going to be 5,000 of you walking behind me."

Russian activist Boris Kagarlitsky surveys and analyzes social protests in his country.

Forty-five years after King was killed supporting their historic strike, some of the same men who marched with him still pick up Memphis' garbage - and now they are fighting to hold on to jobs that some city leaders want to hand over to a private company.

Labor experts say unions are focusing on the hospitality field and less traditionally unionized workplaces - car washes, retailers, taxi and limo companies - as membership rolls have decreased. The percentage of private sector workers represented by unions has fallen from a peak of about 35 percent in the mid 1950s to about 7 percent, said Fred Feinstein, a former general counsel with the National Labor Relations Board who now works as a union.

How much sicker does the patient have to get before the doctors stop prescribing poison?