Portside

The conditions of employment for domestic workers vary from house to house, but along with miners, domestic workers have long endured one of the most exploitative employment relationships in South Africa’s history. Although a new minimum wage is more than domestic workers have ever earned, it is still not enough -- what is needed is a living wage.

If this attack is successful it would decimate the National Treasury Employees Union and leave IRS staffers without union representation. More that than, it would weaken federal unions generally by making them all vulnerable to a similar assault.

Strip clubs have provided me and many other dancers with steady income for our entire adult lives. I’m thankful to have enjoyed decades as a paid entertainer. But we deserve the same protections and respect given to any employee in any other work force.

Congress is in revolt, inflation is rising, Brazil’s credit rating is flirting with junk status, a huge corruption scandal looms, and polls put her approval rating at 8% ahead of Sunday’s planned protests – can things get any worse for Rousseff?

Having misunderstood the Iraq War, U.S. Republicans are taking a dangerously hawkish turn on foreign policy.

Perhaps in no U.S. city is the wreckage wrought by today's capitalism better seen than in Detroit, the once mighty auto metropolis now morphed into a showcase of post-industrial abandonment. New signs of rebirth and redevelopment there are fraught with contradictions, as artists and gentrifiers engage in what Dora Apel calls "ruin lust." Here, Scott McLemee reviews Apel's take on the (former?) Motor City and post-industrial tourism and aesthetics.

As gaps in income and wealth continue to widen in the United States and structural and institutional barriers to economic security persist, this report reminds us that there is still much work to do to ensure that all women, children, and families have a fair shot at success and opportunity in our society.

During the time of the mine wars, you had mine guards. Well, now, you have mind guards, They don’t have to use strong-armed tactics anymore. They control the radio. They control the news. They control the schools. When a region or a country doesn’t know its own history, it’s like a person with Alzheimer’s.

One of the problems that remain with campus police is that there is so little information about what they do and how they do it, particularly for those employed by private universities. A bill introduced in the Illinois House would have improved that by making private university police subject to public records laws, but the bill died in a Senate Committee in May.

The ire of McConnell and other tobacco-state lawmakers throws a wrench into the negotiations.