Portside

Food service workers at Harvard are members of UNITE-HERE Local 26. After two years, they earn $21.73 per hour on average, while for many years the DoubleTree hotel in Cambridge owned by the university non-union housekeepers earned only about $15 an hour. Last year, housekeepers at the hotel mounted a push to join Local 26 as well. Hilton, which owns the DoubleTree chain bumped salaries to $18 an hour— but has so far managed to avoid a unionized workforce.

Cotus, Facebook, And Free Speech; GOP's Twitter Shell Game; Cisco's Troubles; NYT Disruption Blues; First Look Media Snafu; A Cyber Spectre Haunts The NYP

On a October morning, Ebbs is standing next to a historical marker erected near the Wade home site a few years ago. "I’ve made sure that my children understand the significance of the fact that there’s a monument here and it is our blood relatives that went through what they did to receive something like this. So I make sure that I definitely give it the respect that it’s due."

On the eve of the latest United Nations Climate Summit in Lima, Peru, even the New York Times noted November 30 that scientists and climate-policy experts "warn that it now may be impossible to prevent the temperature of the planet's atmosphere from rising by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. With so much at much at stake, why have world leaders done so little to embrace comprehensive, mandatory solutions, relying instead on modest, market-based proposals for voluntary reductions?

This month marks the 15th anniversary of the “Battle in Seattle,” the historic protest against the World Trade Organization in 1999. The author, a labor and community organizer for 31 years, was at the time director of Seattle Union Now, a joint project of the King County Labor Council and the AFL-CIO. He remembers Tyree Scott, a quiet presence in the labor movement who urged unity when it mattered most.

Although it was not programmable in the modern sense, some have called it the first analog computer.

In the 1960s, the agency sought to fight Communism through the students’ rights movement. There’s little reason to think its tactics have changed.

If anyone can overcome the hurdles for a Latino mayoral candidate in Chicago, it's Garcia given his lifetime commitment to a multiracial coalition—not just talking the talk, but 30 years of walking the walk.

The boundary separating white Anglo upscale school districts from the burgeoning non-white and non-Anglo populations in downscale communities is fast becoming a flashpoint inside America.

Even though the four counts do not include cold blooded murder, we in West Virginia and the rest of the world know that the big man is on trial for the deaths of those men just as the nation knew that Al Capone’s trial on tax evasion was for his part in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. There will be no one in the courtroom or on the jury that doesn’t remember that morning. There is no one in Raleigh County that doesn’t know who ran Massey Energy.