Portside

Reflections on Prison Labor, Unions, and Whitney Benns' The Atlantic Article "American Slavery Reinvented"

FOIA documents reveal Agent Orange Dioxin, toxic dumps, fish kills on Okinawa Base. Two veterans win compensation, many more denied.

The US Department of Defense will work on compensating the families of the victims killed in a deadly American airstrike on a Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The strike “mistakenly” killed 22 people.

In a landmark decision, the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that dues checkoff must be continued after contract expiration.

Even as mainstream outlets start to pay more attention to Latino viewers and with new frontiers popping up on cable, things are changing as rapidly on television for the Hispanic audience as they are for everyone else. What seems to be a new constant, however, is that the focus on this market is certainly going to grow.

More than four decades after construction began in 1973, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is finally getting close to starting up the Watts Bar Unit 2 nuclear reactor. While the TVA and the nuclear industry describe Watts Bar 2 as “the first new nuclear generation of the 21st Century,” in fact the TVA resuscitated a demonstrably unsafe 1960s-era ice condenser design that was abandoned decades ago by the rest of the nuclear industry.

It has never made less sense to build fossil fuel power plants.

Child care costs constitute a large portion of the income families need in order to achieve a modest yet adequate standard of living—and are particularly onerous for workers paid the minimum wage.

Increasingly, workers say, they want and need a union. They also want—and say they are willing to register and to vote for—political candidates who will fight for their needs.

The Bard Debate Union at Eastern New York Correctional spends hundreds of hours preparing for a debate while carrying full undergraduate course loads.