Portside

July 23, 2015, a formal Mediation Committee established by Samsung and civil society groups issued ground breaking recommendations to compensate hundreds of workers who became ill while working at Samsung and to implement innovative prevention policies to protect their workers in the future. Samsung has agreed to the Committee’s recommendation to provide 100 billion won ($85.8 million), but rejected the core recommendation — funding an independent non-profit foundation.

Teachers at Chicago’s Urban Prep Academies voted to form a union—then a whole bunch of them got fired…

Angélica Rivera may have dazzled on the TV screen, but her shady relationship with a government contractor has wreaked havoc on her husband's presidency.

Amazon factories, with their insane, round-the-clock delivery schedules, are notoriously hellish places to work. But life at corporate Amazon isn’t exactly a picnic, either.

The country has lost one of its most passionate and eloquent voices for the cause of social and economic justice.

Police ... sometimes are workers who make very little money, oftentimes receive very little benefits in terms of the capitalist system that we live in and we want to recognize that . . . If police were to excise police brutality and anti-Blackness from their institution, I think we'd be having a very different conversation. And that's also a conversation that I would be happy to have.

Along the Atlantic coast of Honduras, Afro-Caribbean Garifuna communities are being forced from their land, as proposals for the creation of mega-tourism projects and corporate-run “model cities,” gain momentum. Mega-projects are just one of the problems Honduran Garifuna communities have had to face in the six years since a U.S-supported coup d’etat removed then-President Manuel Zelaya from power. But the Garifuna are organizing to defend their land and culture.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is warning of a major humanitarian crisis in Yemen, where violence “has radically increased” since March, when the U.S.-backed Saudi aerial offensive began. According to Teresa Sancristóval, the head of MSF’s emergency unit, “The impact of this conflict is much wider than only the bombing or the shooting. Yemen is predicted to be the first country in the world to have a capital without water, and water scarcity has an enormous impact.”

Fires are proliferating throughout California where an unprecedented drought has turned the California countryside into a tinder box of dry and dying vegetation. But the fires are also emblematic of the state’s dependence on inmates to help battle the wildfires. California’s firefighting program (Cal Fire) boasts the country’s largest inmate firefighting program. Close to half of Cal Fire’s firefighters, approximately 4,000 prisoners, are inmate firefighters.

The rapidly deteriorating health of Mohammed Allaan, a Palestinian political prisoner on hunger strike has pit Israeli legislators, who recently enacted a law mandating that he be force-fed, against physicians, who refuse to comply on grounds that doing so would be tantamount to "torture," and violate their Hippocratic Oath. Hunger strikes have become a common form of protest by Palestinians held indefinitely without charge in Israeli administrative detention.