Portside

If the union wins a dispute over whether two engineers in Miami can join the union that represents more than 25,000 workers at Boeing and other companies, it becomes much easier and less costly for the union to organize workers outside metro Puget Sound. That means the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace has a better chance of re-unionizing the more than 4,000 engineering jobs that Boeing has moved, or plans to move, out of Washington.

As democratic enterprises, coops are more than one piece of an economic development model. They give workers more control over their work environment, and their capacity for democratic participation in the wider world is enriched.

From the May/June 2014 issue of ATC. A thorough look at how the Affordable Care Act will change health care beyond just the consumer interaction. A useful resource for health care consumers, health care workers, and reform activists.

WikiLeaks released the secret draft text for the Trade in Services Agreement. The deal covers 50 countries and over 68 percent of world trade in services. The draft had been classified to keep it secret during the negotiations and for five years post-enactment. The trade deal aims to cement the deregulatory model of the 1990s by forbidding countries from improving financial regulation and roll back the regulatory structure strengthened after the global financial crisis.

Ultimately, Alderman Muñoz tells In These Times, the CPC hopes to do just that by using initiatives like a $15 minimum wage to bridge the sharp economic divides that plague Chicago and the country as a whole.

The organizers of Freedom Summer did not just have a one-year plan. The summer of 1964 was always meant to be the beginnings of a multi-faceted, multi-year campaign. Any modern movement to build a more inclusive Black Belt needs to be seen as a generational battle.

Our society’s tendency to idealize local food allows small farmers to pay workers substandard wages, house them in shoddy labor camps, and quash their ability to unionize to demand better working conditions.

Imagine how much stronger the U.S. antiwar movement would be today if its major formations joined together to issue a Call for united demonstrations on both coasts to demand an end to U.S. intervention in Iraq.

Enforcement is not the solution to the latest version of the United States’ immigration issue. To stem immigration, if that’s indeed what is desired, the United States needs to make Central America habitable again, especially since the U.S. government has been the major instigator in the region for at least the past century.

In this moment of reactionary politics, I am reminded of words from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the moral imperatives that anchor public policy: “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."