Portside

Student support workers at Evergreen State College win strike. They are members of The Washington Federation of State Employees/AFSCME. After 17 months of negotiations followed by mediation they went on strike May 28. Their new contract goes into effect July1. This is a rare example of an effective strike in recent years.

After more than a decade of sitting out the fiercest race in town, leaders of the United Federation of Teachers are plotting a comeback.

The AFL-CIO supports these Turkish labor federations’ call for immediate end to the brutal police crackdown in Turkey. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka sent a letter to Prime Minister Erdogan supporting the demands of the unions.

At present the polls wobble between six and nine percent for The Left. Yet if ardent speeches like those three, with no punches pulled, can be followed by an equally vigorous election campaign, that two digit goal, though by no means easy, may not be unattainable.

Yesterday's victory in the Supreme Court should still be celebrated - but only cautiously so.

"Brazil woke up stronger today," Rousseff said in a televised speech in Brasilia. "The size of yesterday's demonstrations shows the energy of our democracy, the strength of the voice of the streets and the civility of our population."

This article is based upon an interrogation of two books: Gregg Shotwell, Autoworkers Under the Gun: A Shop-Floor View of the End of the American Dream; and Jane McAlevey with Bob Ostertag, Raising Expectations (And Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting For the Labor Movement. Each book focuses on an iconic labor union (UAW and SEIU). What they report gives us reason for both deep concern and hope concerning the future of organized labor.

Fueled by a race-baiting, national marketing campaign and the missionary-like evangelism of its affiliates, Care Net has turned the complex reality behind black abortion rates into a single, fictional story: poor black women who have abortions are the unwitting victims of feminists and morally deficient reproductive healthcare providers, embodied in sadists such as Gosnell. Crisis pregnancy centers, in this fable, are the best place those women can go to be saved.