Portside

Instead of seeking out farms growing delicious fruits and vegetables, chefs look one step deeper into the food production system—to the plant breeders who provide farmers with seeds.

It might surprise unionists here, that Vietnam not only has a labor newspaper, Lao Dong (Labor), but that it has a staff of about 200. It's a mainstream publication and the second most widely read newspaper in Vietnam, with a print run of 40,000 and another 200,000 digital subscribers. And Lao Dong has deep roots, having been published since 1930. This is in remarkable contrast to the United States, where we have no national labor newspaper.

this is the reply of Yanis Varoufakis to the Open Letter by George Souvlis and Samuele Mazzolini about the Democracy in Europe Movement 2015 DiEM25, which appeared earlier this week on LeftEast. George and Samuele raise crucial questions about DiEM25 and our project to democratise Europe.

President Obama’s trip to Cuba this week accelerated the warming of U.S.-Cuban relations. Many people in both countries believe that normalizing relations will spur investment that can help Cuba develop its economy and improve life for its citizens. But in agriculture, U.S. investment could cause harm instead.

A gradual increase in California’s minimum hourly wage from $10 to $15 by 2023 would raise wages of 5.6 million workers by an average of 24 percent, according to a brief released today by UC Berkeley.

A recent UCLA Labor Center report, Get to Work or Go To Jail: Workplace Rights Under Threat, goes further by exploring the ways in which the criminal justice system can also lock workers on probation, parole, facing court-ordered debt, or child support debt into bad jobs. Because these workers face the threat of incarceration for unemployment, the report finds that they cannot afford to refuse a job, quit a job, or to challenge their employers.

According to data from the Center for Disease Control, black women have long faced high rates of depression and low rates of treatment. “Scandal” has been so groundbreaking in many ways; it’s curious that it hasn’t seized a really ripe, low-hanging opportunity to be more progressive in its depiction of black women’s struggles to safeguard their mental health.

Under an obscure provision of the city's wage hike, unionized hotels were granted an exemption allowing them to pay their employees less. The result is that some members in the hotel workers union Unite Here, now make less than those doing the same job in non-union workplaces.

And you thought there were just solids, liquids, gases and plasma

The Treasury Department is often a limp watchdog when it comes to policing arcane tax dodges, but this time, Treasury grew some fangs by tightening its regulations, which led Pfizer to call off the deal. Pfizer’s loss is a potent win for small-d democracy. It can provide a starting point for reinvigorating reform politics.