Portside

Unions appear to be making a comeback as the Covid-19 economic crisis has emboldened workers and stirred up longstanding outrage over inequality and inadequate wages and benefits.

Out of nearly 1,000 ballots cast at the LDJ5 warehouse, just 380 supported joining the Amazon Labor Union, which made history last month with a scrappy campaign that defeated the e-commerce giant at a neighboring warehouse.

Undeterred, Smalls wants all American workers to have access to the organizing strategies that resulted in his union’s historic win, regardless of the company.

We can take heart in the knowledge that everyday people have the power to force their elected officials to keep public goods public. Pittsburgh’s Our Water Campaign showed us how, with strategies that other cities can replicate, adapt, and pass on.

In the years following World War II, American and European food scientists hoped to feed the world with common pond scum supplemented with plastics. But it wasn’t just the unpleasant flavor that killed the algae craze.

The inside story of the world’s most notorious commercial spyware and the big tech companies waging war against it.

In 2014, I designed the Glasgow May Day poster and I have been doing it almost every year since. There is always a new theme linked to local and international, past and present, trade union activism. My body of work forms a historical record itself.

Mothers—and some fathers—are increasingly suing employers for discriminating against working parents. They are succeeding.

1. Barack Obama has commuted the sentence of Oscar López Rivera, a victory for the Puerto Rican independence activist who is considered to be one of the world’s longest-serving political prisoners. 2. Chelsea Manning, the US army soldier who became one of the most prominent whistleblowers in modern times when she exposed the nature of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan is to be freed in May as a gift of outgoing president Barack Obama.

Davos Man is also fine with government regulations that reduce the bargaining power of ordinary workers. For example, Davos Man has not objected to central bank rules that target low inflation even at the cost of raising unemployment. Nor has Davos Man objected to meaningless caps on budget deficits, like those in the European Union, that have kept millions of workers from getting jobs.