Portside

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,

The mess was codified in 1966 when restaurant and other tipped workers finally got included in the Fair Labor Standards Act. But instead of one fair wage, the law created a second tier: tipped workers who could be paid a subminimum wage.

As mayor of Chicago, Rahm has unleashed an unprecedented attack on working families, especially the poor and people of color.

A new analysis, undertaken jointly by the Bicep group and the Planck group, has confirmed that the Bicep signal [of gravitational waves from the Big Bang] was mostly, if not all, stardust, and that there is no convincing evidence of the gravitational waves. No evidence of inflation.

Despite serious threats to their safety, more than 200 female migrant domestic laborers in Lebanon gathered January 25th to form the first trade union in the Arab world for domestic workers. Lebanese laws deny foreign workers the right to form their own unions, so the new union is aimed at all domestic workers irrespective of nationality. According to the United Nations, the Arab World is home to some 30 million migrant workers.

Many countries and treatment providers like MSF rely on affordable quality generic medicines to treat life-threatening diseases. But the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) would make it much harder for generic companies to produce cheaper drugs that are vital to people’s health. The TPP would give pharmaceutical companies longer monopolies over brand name drugs and the ability to charge high prices for critical drugs for longer periods of time.

Salon reporter Lindsay Abrams speaks with biologist Tyrone Hayes, subject of a new mini-documentary, and the director, Jonathan Demme. Agrochemical giant Syngenta has followed Hayes, besmirched his reputation, and threatened him and his family’s well being for revealing the potential health dangers of one of our most commonly used herbicides.

Labor officials in California have passively watched Democratic Governor Jerry Brown put California's state workplace health and safety agency-Cal/OSHA on a starvation diet. The agency has less enforcement resources than under Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, but state labor officials appear to have employed a strategy of maintaining access and friendly relations with Brown and his appointees at all costs, relinquishing the fight for workplace safety.