Portside

Union members in Pennsylvania held a mass demonstration inside the state capital to protest a Republican effort to strip public employee unions of their right to have member dues collected through payroll deduction. The protesters were clear that they see this Republican effort as just the beginning of an attempt to destroy unions and workers' rights in the state.

Court injunction brought in by oil and gas company makes even supermarkets off-limits for Vera Scroggins.

Anti-labor forces in Tennessee and elsewhere are leading a fight against both Volkswagen and the UAW to prevent unionization. These right-wing forces see a successful unionization drive as opening the door to the UAW in other southern states.

Stateside Communists were the underdogs, fighting the establishment for justice - the victims of censorship and police repression, not its perpetrators.

Seeger is famous, of course, for making “We Shall Overcome” a civil and human rights anthem. The story of where he found that song is told below by historian Christopher Phelps. It is excerpted, by permission, from Christopher Phelps, "Lefts Old and New: Sixties Radicalism, Now and Then," in A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times, eds. Howard Brick and Gregory Parker (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming).

President Obama is on the verge of cementing a shameful legacy as Deporter-in-Chief, presiding over what will soon be 2 million deportations – the most under any President in history.