Portside

Alleging unpaid wages and repeated retaliation, McDonald’s workers in central Pennsylvania launched a surprise strike at 11 this morning. The strikers are student guest workers from Latin America and Asia, brought to the United States under the controversial J-1 cultural exchange visa program. Their employer is one of the thousands of McDonald’s franchisees with whom the company contracts to run its ubiquitous stores.

Historian Mark Solomon looks at the prospects for a new socialist left.

Student guest workers from Asia and Latin America stage strike at McDonald's in central Pennsylvania.

Despite the election results, efforts are still underway to restrict US women's access to healthcare and contraception

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.