Skip to main content

Philly Teachers Call Off Work In Bottom-Up Campaign

Samantha Winslow Labor Notes
To create pressure on the district, a group of teachers organized their own protest. The 11,000-member Philadelphia Federation of Teachers didn’t authorize the action. Instead it was a rank-and-file group that got the employer's attention.

‘If You Don’t Want Us, Tell Us To Go Back’: The Making of a California Prison Town

Sarah Tory, High Country News High Country News
Adelanto, a town of 32,000, is home to three prisons. This was not a coincidence. With a history of agriculture, excessive water use, the Great Depression, cheap vacant land filled with a military base which closed in the 1990s, Adelanto turned to prisons. During the 1980s, under increasingly stringent drug laws and harsh sentencing policies, demand for new prisons had grown. So had the belief that prisons could nourish economic development in rural communities.

U.S. Government Eases Sodium and Whole Grain Standards for School Meals

Harvard Chan Editors Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health
A new proclamation by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture partially rolls back the stronger school nutrition standards in place since 2012, allowing states to grant exemptions for serving whole-grain rich products, and delaying any of the upcoming requirements to lower sodium levels until after 2020.

Demolishing the Mythology Around the Vietnam Antiwar Movement

Kevin Young Waging Nonviolence
Book Review: Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory. Author Penny Lewis demolishes the mythology, and shows that working-class people were at least as opposed to the war as the middle and upper classes and that they played an indispensable role in the movement to end it, and that the black and Chicano movements were among the most militant antiwar voices.

Public Sector Workers Fighting Back

Public sector workers have been scapegoated as a cause of our poor economy, and neoliberal reforms have targeted public sector unions. But public sector workers are fighting back. Teachers in Lee, Massachusetts rejected merit pay as a protest against education reforms; other unions have begun to flip the script, putting the blame on the 1% and calling for taxing the rich.