Portside

The ongoing organizing effort of fast-food workers has highlighted the highly exploitative conditions faced by those at the deep fryers and cash registers of America’s most profitable fast food outlets, which include Burger King, McDonald’s, Dominos, Pizza Hut and KFC. The actions and considerable media attention has also begun to chip away at the conventional image of a fast-food worker as someone who bears her servitude with a youthful grin.

Which way will 45,000 California healthcare workers swing? The answer has major implications for labor.

So far, the much-dreaded "sequester" - some $85 billion in federal spending cuts between March and September 30 - hasn't been evident to most Americans.

Margaret Thatcher is dead. The powerful will praise her, the rest of us will not. " in the aftermath of the demise of the Iron Lady, the first woman to become a British prime minister is generally being lauded from the US right and the middle as a hero for her country and the globe. This Thatcher bubble will not last forever."

She changed everything, and for millions it was change for the worse. There was nothing like her before, and there has been nothing like her since. Thank God.If anyone is inclined to remind me one should not speak ill of the dead, let me remind them she had nothing good to say about us while she was alive.

It's time to start paying close attention to the mechanisms of the deregulation machine. For the past 30 years, the business lobbies have pushed Congress and the executive branch to disassemble the regulatory system that has protected us from the worst excesses of Wall Street and Big Business. The effects of deregulation stretch to all walks of life.

A documentary delving into Davis' story, Free Angela and All Political Prisoners, recently opened in select theaters nationwide. The activist helps us remember that blacks are part of American history's fabric, says the director.

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which occurred fifty years ago this August 28, remains one of the most successful mobilizations ever created by the American Left. Organized by a coalition of trade unionists, civil rights activists, and feminists—most of them African American and nearly all of them socialists—the protest drew nearly a quarter-million people to the nation’s capital. Yet the Left has not claimed the March as its legacy.