Portside

More than 1,000 members of Culinary Union Local 226 (UNITE HERE) picketed downtown Las Vegas on Saturday, April 12. Contracts covering 10 downtown casinos are expired, as well as Brady Laundry. Major Strip casinos, including those owned by MGM Resorts and Caesar's, were settled in recent months. In addition to picketing, workers queued up from 8am until 7pm to sign up for strike relief benefits and strike picket shifts.

Since the founding of public higher education, our nation has moved progressively toward expanding the doors of access. But in the last generation, we have moved in the opposite direction. State higher education funding on a per-student basis is lower today than it was in 1980. Federal financial aid no longer provides grants robust enough to defray the rising cost of college.

In her new book, All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power, Nomi Prins traces the hundred-year history of collusion between Washington and Wall Street. Prins reveals how a small number of bankers have played critical roles in shaping a century’s worth of financial, foreign and domestic policy in the United States including the Federal Reserve, the response to the Great Depression, and the founding of the IMF and the World Bank.

Across the northern plains, native grassland is being turned into farmland at a rate not seen since the 1920s. The environmental consequences could be disastrous.

When it comes to our immune response, genetics takes a back seat to pathogens.

Elevated long-term unemployment for all groups, like we see today, means that today’s long-term unemployment crisis is not due to something wrong with these workers, it is due to the fact that businesses across the board simply haven’t needed to significantly increase hiring because they haven’t seen demand for their goods and services pick up enough to warrant it.

The current issue of the "International Journal of Labour Research," which is published by the ILO, is concerned with the relationship of unions and worker cooperatives. It is titled, "Trade Unions and Worker Cooperatives: Where are We at?" Rob Witherell, of the United Steel Workers Union has an article in this issue, " An Emerging Solidarity: Worker Cooperatives, Unions, and the New Union Cooperative Model in the United States".

“Paul Robeson: A Watched Man” A book by Jordan Goodman. “Paul Robeson,” historian Joseph Dorinson ruefully wrote in the 2002 introduction to his co-edited collection of essays about him, “is the greatest legend nobody knows.”

In 2011 Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the 'red line' he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons.

In a narrow vote this week, the Senate politely smothered the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would have protected workers’ rights to compare and discuss their wages at work. Aimed at dismantling workplace “pay secrecy” policies, the legislation built on the 2009 Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which strengthens safeguards for women and other protected groups against wage discrimination.