Portside

Fed up with inequality, unemployment and labor reforms — and increasingly outraged at the financial and political elite — tens of thousands across France are taking to the streets and the squares.

Instead of seeking out farms growing delicious fruits and vegetables, chefs look one step deeper into the food production system—to the plant breeders who provide farmers with seeds.

It might surprise unionists here, that Vietnam not only has a labor newspaper, Lao Dong (Labor), but that it has a staff of about 200. It's a mainstream publication and the second most widely read newspaper in Vietnam, with a print run of 40,000 and another 200,000 digital subscribers. And Lao Dong has deep roots, having been published since 1930. This is in remarkable contrast to the United States, where we have no national labor newspaper.

this is the reply of Yanis Varoufakis to the Open Letter by George Souvlis and Samuele Mazzolini about the Democracy in Europe Movement 2015 DiEM25, which appeared earlier this week on LeftEast. George and Samuele raise crucial questions about DiEM25 and our project to democratise Europe.

President Obama’s trip to Cuba this week accelerated the warming of U.S.-Cuban relations. Many people in both countries believe that normalizing relations will spur investment that can help Cuba develop its economy and improve life for its citizens. But in agriculture, U.S. investment could cause harm instead.

A gradual increase in California’s minimum hourly wage from $10 to $15 by 2023 would raise wages of 5.6 million workers by an average of 24 percent, according to a brief released today by UC Berkeley.

A recent UCLA Labor Center report, Get to Work or Go To Jail: Workplace Rights Under Threat, goes further by exploring the ways in which the criminal justice system can also lock workers on probation, parole, facing court-ordered debt, or child support debt into bad jobs. Because these workers face the threat of incarceration for unemployment, the report finds that they cannot afford to refuse a job, quit a job, or to challenge their employers.

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.