Portside

City regulators haven’t enforced a 2007 law that requires doormen, janitors and other service workers at taxpayer-subsidized apartment buildings to be paid wages comparable to union rates.

City regulators haven’t enforced a 2007 law that requires doormen, janitors and other service workers at taxpayer-subsidized apartment buildings to be paid wages comparable to union rates.

The anthropologist Sidney Mintz has died at the age of 93. His book, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, used sugar as an entry point into a critical analysis of social institutions, in this case slavery, race, class, and global capitalism. The book continues to be relevant to those concerns as well as to today’s obsession with sugar consumption.

Ashley Smith interviews Ellen David Friedman about the recent crackdown on labor organizers in China.

Context is crucial to the politics of a narrative, always. In the context of the #BlackLivesMatter protests, and the increasing public focus on police brutality toward particularly African American communities in the U.S., it is important to ask how the fantasy of Luke Cage – a black man who is “unbreakable” – fits into the current socio-political landscape.

Experts on banking and labor markets offer their reasons for optimism and pessimism going into 2016.

If you’re no longer drawing lines on population but you’re selectively using criteria like age, that hits [the Hispanic] community very hard. Put aside the whole citizenship issue. The largest group of people who would be subtracted from the apportionment base would be children, and because [Hispanics] have disproportionately so many more children than the Anglo population has, that starts shifting seats all by itself, before you start to even consider citizenship.

The ILWU’s effort to create affordable integrated housing for working people says much about its values and efforts to define the city that birthed the union and remains its headquarters.

Scott Slater wants to pump billions of gallons to LA and other drought-hit cities - and make $2.4bn in the process

Problematic entries reinforce the popular impression that science is impossible to understand and isn't for most people—they make science seem elitist. And that's an impression that we as a society really can't afford.