Portside

As labor unions across much of the world struggle to increase their membership, how do workers get their employers to raise wages and assure safe conditions? That’s the question some of the world’s most innovative worker groups are asking. And they’re hopeful they have found a solution.

November 7, 1917, the American writer John Reed said, was "Ten Days That Shook the World." A hundred years on, the anniversary of the October Revolution is celebrated and debated. But, for more than seventy years the revolution inspired millions around the world, in the belief in socialism, and for an end to colonialism. The failures of the Soviet Union have not however diminished the hopes, aspirations and renewed faith in socialism - a socialism of a different type.

During the 1970s women and people of color were organizing their workplaces at impressive rates — they just weren’t winning. Lane Windham in her new book recounts that history and its consequences.

For the past 50 years, some of this country’s most celebrated historians have taken up the task of making Americans less stupid about the Civil War.

Ju-Hyun Park grew up in Northern California. In his early childhood, he remembers, people asked, “Where are you from?” That question later shifted to “North or South Korea?”

Dana Cloud, who was targeted herself, offers a guide for other academics.

A collection of essays curated by the progressive group Jewish Voice for Peace, the book under review provides a diversity of perspectives and standpoints exploring critical questions concerning uses and abuses of antisemitism in the twenty-first-century, focusing on the intersection between antisemitism, accusations of antisemitism, and Palestinian human rights activism.

Jesmyn Ward is best known for her novel Salvage the Bones (2011). In this new book, says reviewer Ibrahim, "she traces an American highway odyssey, from the Mississippi Gulf Coast to Parchman Farm, the notorious state penitentiary."

One day after the Revolution, the Soviet government issued a Decree of Peace -- a signal of the centrality of the struggle against war to the building of socialism.

Union leaders say they take sexual harassment seriously. In addition to expanding staff training and counseling as needed, SEIU has established additional channels through which employees can report potential issues. At its executive council meeting in March, the AFL-CIO approved a new, stronger code of conduct and a new process for addressing issues like sexual harassment and requiring its state and local affiliates to do the same.