Portside

While prisoners refuse to perform their jobs, some guards are not showing up to work.

This fresh look at the 1971 Attica, New York prison uprising, which was brutally repressed by then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller, is not just a history. It is an intervention into contemporary debates about the U.S. prison system.

Trump's comment about Alicia Machado was not only a sexist slur against Latinas but also an attack on the the many millions of individuals who work at low paid jobs.

There was something disturbing in seeing Trump once again being normalized by being made part of an ordinary contest in coherence and “presentation” and “preparation.” In truth, that was the least of it, because what was really outside any norm of decency was what he thought even after you had dutifully distilled away the incoherence and the manic improvisations.

At some colleges and universities, it’s common for students to introduce themselves, in class or in student group meetings, by name, followed by a string of pronouns. “I’m Lizzie; she/her/hers,” for example. I decided to adopt a compromise solution for this semester: students should list their pronouns along with their names only if they were so inclined. I also said that as a class we will refer to one another by our first names or the pronoun "they" (grammar evolves!).

The violence plaguing Africa remains far too invisible to most Americans and the world. Unlike the pillage of Africa in earlier periods of the slave trade and colonial rule, illicit financial transactions are most often hidden from public view. They happen through fraudulent invoicing of trade, "creative accounting" by multinational corporations, tax giveaways by African governments, and the use of shell companies based in tax havens around the world.

How then do we navigate between Scylla and Charybdis, between a naïve pro-Europeanism and assimilation to nationalism? The EU must be democratised or it will be discredited; it will be peaceful or it will perish. We have to dare not to break with the idea off European unity but with the neoliberal and authoritarian framework of the institutions and treaties through which this idea has been actualised.

Moderators Note: This Portside Labor moderator does not agree with the following proposal by Andy Stern and Eli Lehrer. I do believe that the left in the labor movement needs to know what schemes conservatives are proposing, especially when it comes from a former "labor leader".

The German automaker's U.S. subsidiary earlier this month brought a case in a Washington, D.C.-based federal appeals court seeking to overturn a vote by a group of skilled trade workers at its Chattanooga, Tennessee, assembly plant to join the United Auto Workers. The dispute is a high-profile test of whether unions, an seek new members by targeting smaller groups, rather than organizing whole plants or companies as in the past.

The American Council of Employees, a business-financed rival to the United Auto Workers at Chattanooga’s VW plant, no longer meets the minimum membership threshold to qualify for meetings with management as part of the company’s so-called “Community Organization Engagement” policy. It could not prove it had a minimum of 15 percent of the workforce as active members.