Skip to main content

The ILO’s Quest for Reaffirmation vis-a-vis International Financial Institutions

Chloé Maurel Equal Times
International Labor Organization (ILO) Conventions that protect worker rights should be binding. Just as international financial institutions have the power to enforce their regulations, so too the ILO should have the power to sanction states or multinational corporations that breach its principles.

FIFA: Why the USA?

Dave Zirin The Progressive
This story may very well end with the seventy-nine- year-old FIFA Boss finding a new home inside a U.S. prison. But no, the United States is not the well-oiled machine Putin and others imagine, and sometimes the simplest explanations are in fact the best ones.

Congress Did Not Pass an Anti-Surveillance Law (And Other Thoughts About the USA Freedom Act)

Kevin Gosztola Firedoglake
June 2 was a day that the people won against the security state. US citizens took away the government’s control of nearly all of their domestic call records. And power was forced to act because their operation of a program and the operations of a secret surveillance court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, were no longer seen as legitimate. The extent of the victory, however, probably ends there.

Until the Rulers Obey

Staughton Lynd ZNetwork
Editors Clifton Ross and Marcy Rein offer a host of interviews with today's social change activists from Latin America. Staughton Lynd offers a review of this kaleidoscopic survey.

Will Kaiser's Labor Partnership Crack?

Alexandra Bradbury Labor Notes
It’s this year’s biggest private-sector bargaining, between the Kaiser Permanente system and a coalition of 28 locals representing 100,000 health care workers.But the national deal, due June 4, may reveal widening cracks in the celebrated labor-management partnership that turns 18 this year. Kaiser is looking for three concessions, say non-coalition unions: increased health care co-pays, cuts to retiree medical coverage, and a two-tier pension.

Will Gawker Go Union?

Steven Greenhouse Los Angeles Times
If the unionization effort succeeds, it will be a big PR boost for the ailing labor movement. It will show that unions, which have focused in recent years on organizing low-wage workers, can also attract hip, highly educated workers, many of them Ivy League graduates. But if Gawker staffers reject the union, it will be an embarrassing blow to labor, especially because so much of the Gawker debate has been out in the open.

Arizona Protesters Organize Against Border Patrol Checkpoints

Ashoka Jegroo Waging Nonviolence
About 100 people from the town of Arivaca, Arizona made their way to the temporary Border Patrol checkpoint on Arivaca Road, about 50 miles southwest of Tucson, at around 10 a.m. on Wednesday morning. The action, organized by the group People Helping People in the Border Zone, was set to be a “community hearing and sit-in” to shut down the checkpoint along with various other checkpoints in the area near the Arizona-Mexican border.