Portside

The Portside moderators send our heartfelt thanks to our Portside Labor readers, for coming through in response to our annual appeal! This year all Portside readers responded with the largest amount in contributions ever - nearly $19,000.

Unlike Spanish evangelism, US colonial machinery was geared to using the Philippines for thorough exploitation of the newly acquired territory, envisaging the eventual expansion of multinational corporations and ultimate global hegemony. This brief historical outline provides a background for global context and working class analysis of the Philippines and Filipino mass movements.

A revelatory look at how a unique border-crossing set of partnerships among Israel’s high-tech companies (many involved in developing border wall technology in their own land), an Arizona tech park, and Mexican low-wage factories is intent on creating a “virtual wall” to shut down and militarize the U.S.-Mexican border.

Three 17-year-old Norwegian fashion bloggers travel to Cambodia for an online reality series experiencing a month long life of a Cambodian garment worker and get an up close idea about exploitation and H&M profits.

Student Campaign Forces 16 Universities to End Contracts with JanSport/North Face and Parent Company VF Corp Over Sweatshop Abuses in Bangladeshi Garment Factories.

United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) is a national student-led movement with over 150 locals. We campaign in solidarity with workers on our campuses and in factories abroad, using our leverage as students to win historic victories over multinational corporations. Join us! This year’s National Conference will be on February 20-21. The 2015 National Conference gathers hundreds of students committed to taking back our universities and demanding respect for workers.

Despite resistance, domestic workers in Lebanon held a founding conference for a new union. Seven women, from four countries, began organizing the union in 2012. The Ministry of Labor has tried to block the union but the workers have persisted and made history.

In the first big strike of the year, 3,500 California NUHW health care workers took to the picket line at Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest health care provider (HMO). Astonishingly, the California Nurses Association (CNA-NNU), a union with a reputation as a militant fighter for nurses, a union that, along with NUHW, rejected “partnership” with Kaiser, and a union that has in fact been affiliated with NUHW for more than two years, has settled short with Kaiser.

The liberal way of viewing the problem rests on a misunderstanding of the origins of the police and what they were created to do.

Food movement advocates and consumers, driven to forge alternatives to industrial agribusiness, have neglected the labor economy that underpins ‘local’ food production,