Portside

Autoworker expectations for the 2015 UAW/Big Three contracts were to end the lower-tier wage that the union agreed first agreed to in 2007, at the time of the economic crisis. Over the last decade the higher-tier workers lost four dollars an hour to inflation and have been looking for a raise, and perhaps a restoration of the Cost-of-Living-Adjustment (COLA) that had been suspended.

A gray hoodie will not protect her son from rain or cold, writes Massachusetts poet January Gill O'Neil, but a mother's fears for "the darkest child/ on our street" express a deeper threat from the outside as color and race threaten the safety of the young.

At the center of the liberal democratic system, workers have fiercely resisted exploitation through the development of worker-based organizations rooted in the ideal of paving the road to a classless and democratic society. All those seeking greater labor militancy must recognize that traditional unions are unable to escape the trap set in the 1930s through fidelity to the collective bargaining agreement. [An earlier version was published by CounterPunch.]

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Herbert Aptheker, to introduce the man by his highest prestige, was an early scholar of African American uprisings against slavery, and in his middle years, the director and coordinator of the W.E.B. DuBois Papers, one of the great archival triumphs of US history at large. For many in the 60s, through his books and public apperances, a generation became aware of the Communist Party, U.S.A.

New data shows no change in the poverty rate in most states for the past two years. Only two states have poverty rates below their 2007 level, before the state of the Great Recession. However, the data suggest that the lack of real income growth over the past decade and a half has been even more pronounced for households at the bottom of the income scale. Click below to see where your state stands (or doesn't).