Portside

Today, the AFL-CIO is seeking to arrest labor's decline through its Working America affiliate, which is a groundbreaking effort at large-scale community organizing, and has some as yet undefined alliance with such other progressive groups as the Sierra Club and the NAACP.

After a decade of wielding the military stick, it’s time for some carrots.

How federal policy and Big Auto drove black blight and white flight. Detroit's first black mayor, Coleman Young, and those that followed may not have known it, but Detroit was already on life support and they were the hospice team.

Viola Liuzzo was the only white female protester to die in the civil rights movement.

POWER met with hundreds of parents, students and teachers as the city and state fail to fill most of a $304 million school funding gap that has forced the layoff of thousands of teachers and staff.

The fast food strikes could be the embryo of a new labor movement that challenges the power of organized money and the skyrocketing inequality that has made the American middle class an endangered species.

Negotiations between BART and Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555 and Service Employees International Union Local 1021 began months ago, but the two sides remained tens of millions of dollars apart on wages, pensions and health care benefits last week.

In a landmark decision today, a federal court found the New York City Police Department's highly controversial stop-and-frisk practices unconstitutional. Today is a victory for all New Yorkers. After more than 5 million stops conducted under the current administration, hundreds of thousands of them illegal and discriminatory, the NYPD has finally been held accountable. It is time for the City to stop denying the problem and work with the community to fix it.

The Workers Defense Project, founded in 2002, has emerged as one of the nation's most creative organizations for immigrant workers. Its focus is the Texas construction industry, which employs more than 600,000 workers. It is one of 225 worker centers nationwide, aiding immigrant workers. Workers Centers show what is possible, and may help infuse new life into the labor movement.

Israeli author Larry Derfner says American Jewish community must refocus anti-Semitism outrage on it's own "dirty laundry." The ADL goes after anti-Semitism with a fist, it goes after Israeli racism with a sigh. When the Jewish state is this riddled with racism, its advocates abroad should be a little less outraged over the offenses of gentiles. They should be a little more humble - and a lot less hypocritical.