Portside

Since 2005, Amazon has helped create one of the most exploited workforces no one has ever seen. Mechanical Turk is the innovation behind “crowdworking,” the low-wage virtual labor phenomenon that has reinvented piecework for the digital age. Created by Amazon in 2005, it remains one of the central platforms—markets, really—where crowd-based labor is bought and sold.

After months of protests, which were largely tolerated by the government, human rights in Cambodia have deteriorated rapidly this year.Global unions have announced a worldwide day of action in support of the detainees before a bail appeal hearing this week, while local unions have threatened another mass walkout.

Hina Shamsi, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) National Security Project, said the Obama administration “continues to fight against even basic transparency” about how it justifies the executions of thousands of people under the programme.

As burgeoning labor group and Franklin-based CHS grow, so do their differences.

An estimated 15,000 activists attended the HKonJ rally last year, bringing thirty buses; this year, the NC NAACP estimated that 80,000-100,000 people rallied in Raleigh, with 100 buses converging from all over the state and country. It was the largest civil rights rally in the South since tens of thousands of voting rights activists marched from Selma to Montgomery in support of the Voting Rights Act.

While Obama talks of putting America on the path to a clean, green future, we're flooding world markets with cheap, high carbon fuels

... this social democratic culture in Latin America, this notion that democracy entails some form of economic justice, which is deep and can’t be rooted out and can’t be expunged, no matter how much Washington and local elites have tried in Latin America ...

Rahm Emanuel’s economic politics put him at the far right wing of the Democratic Party and out of step with the current breed of populist big-city leadership.