Portside

Driest conditions in 100 years could hit the nation’s food basket hard, affecting half of US fruits and vegetables.

The AFL–CIO is a multifaceted institution composed of scores of autonomous unions, so President Richard Trumka’s leadership can hardly turn around this cumbersome vessel all that quickly. But the new emphasis is clear: the unions should ally with progressive partners and devote more energy to make the kind of changes in social policy that can benefit millions of poorly paid and insecure workers.

Public sector workers have been scapegoated as a cause of our poor economy, and neoliberal reforms have targeted public sector unions. But public sector workers are fighting back. Teachers in Lee, Massachusetts rejected merit pay as a protest against education reforms; other unions have begun to flip the script, putting the blame on the 1% and calling for taxing the rich.

Book Review: Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory. Author Penny Lewis demolishes the mythology, and shows that working-class people were at least as opposed to the war as the middle and upper classes and that they played an indispensable role in the movement to end it, and that the black and Chicano movements were among the most militant antiwar voices.

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