Portside

In a turn-around decision, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that employees can use their workplace email to organize a union. The Supreme Court continued it's pro-business agenda by ruling that Amazon can detain workers at the end of their shift to search them, and they do not have to pay them for the time it takes.

Pope Francis is a reform-driven pope that has huge popularity with rank-and-file Catholics who have hungered for a figure to transcend an age of scandal. But, does even a powerful and popular pope have the power to change church doctrine? The advancing story line of Francis’s papacy is how far can a pope go in making reforms against an embedded culture of cardinals and bishops who are averse to change?

A U.S. activist with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which supports Palestinians in their non-violent actions against the Israeli occupation, writes of his last days in Hebron. Hebron is the most populous city in the Occupied Territories. It is the only West Bank city where the Israeli settlers live inside the city itself, including many who live in an area close to the hub of the city, designated as H2.

On December 4th the City of San Jose began the eviction of some 300 men, women, and children residing in tents and shanties on the 68 acres of creek-side property called the Jungle. Where will the former residents go. The Jungle, considered the largest homeless encampment in the U.S., is in the heart of Silicon Valley, the high tech region that accounts for one-third of all of the venture capital investment in the United States.

The Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases are examples of how prosecutors manipulate the grand jury process. Criminal grand juries, with their secrecy, lack of oversight, and disregard for the rules of evidence, serve no useful purpose and make a mockery of justice. If we abolish criminal grand juries, at least the deaths of Brown and Garner will not have been in vain.

If members run the local... what exactly is the union rep's job? We asked four experienced staffers how they approach their day-to-day tasks while keeping the rank and file in the driver’s seat.

Not only do patents push higher prices onto consumers, they burden the research world with the increased costs of paying for the intellectual property needed to do further research . . . If anything, the neoliberal approach to academic research is a return to the privately funded, pre-tenure origins of the university system when numerous schools were simply research labs and promotional arms for private industry

The vision of the 2002 movie “Minority Report,” based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, of “pre-crime” squads identifying people likely to commit crimes is getting less fantastic all the time.

In a remarkable job of reporting, Lyndsey Layton of the Washington Post describes the creation of the Common Core standards. Two men–Gene Wilhoit and David Coleman–went to see Bill Gates in 2008 to ask him to underwrite national standards. He agreed, and within two years, the standards were written and adopted by almost every state in the nation. -- Diane Ravitch

When teachers at the Perelman Jewish Day School in Montgomery County were told in March that the private religious academy would no longer recognize their 60-member union, they filed a federal labor complaint - and then they went to a higher authority.