Portside

Liz Shuler, the federation’s president, announces effort to increase membership by 1m but some say they ‘have to aim much higher’

The industry-backed initiative, which parallels employers’ efforts in other states like California, had divided drivers and sparked fierce debate among Massachusetts politicians and union allies.

Bishop William Barber, a campaign co-chair, said the United States' current poverty level "is actually morally indefensible, constitutionally inconsistent, politically insensitive, and economically insane."

Horrified by the invasion, centrist elites like Dmitri Trenin nonetheless sense the US is using the conflict to destroy their country.

Opportunism in relation to human rights is not a path to peace and justice in our tormented world, which depends on cooperation and multilateralism, and rejects efforts to split the world into a self-righteous struggle between good and evil.

“Innocence is not enough” are words to chill your heart. Janine Jackson interviewed Liliana Segura about a Supreme Court death penalty case for the 6/3/22 episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

A bill recently introduced in the state legislature by the Illinois AFL-CIO could address some of the problems around reprisals. The Wrongful Discharge from Employment Act, supported by Raise the Floor Alliance and NESRI, would force employers to provide fired workers with a clear and legitimate reason for the discharge, essentially proving that it was not done in retaliation.

The research predicts that a nuclear war fought between emerging nuclear weapon states—with less than 1 percent of the explosive power contained in the global nuclear arsenals—can produce catastrophic long-term damage to global environment and weather. A war fought with 100 atomic bombs can result in the coldest average annual surface temperatures experienced in the last 1,000 years, and this prolonged cold (and drought) would last for several years.

To gauge where this type of gerrymandering is taking place and its magnitude, this report used election results [from 2012, 2014, and 2016] in states with six or more congressional districts to assess the extent and the durability of “partisan bias” — the degree of systematic advantage one party receives over another in turning votes into seats . . . It also looked at the relationship between the body that drew the maps and the degree of bias observed.

The African American unemployment rate is at or below its pre-recession level in 11 states: Arkansas, California, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and South Carolina. However, a return to pre-recession levels in these states is barely a recovery: in all of these states, black unemployment rates were above 8.0 percent before the recession.