Portside

The United States has come under sharp criticism at home and abroad for relying on solitary confinement in its prisons more than any other democratic nation in the world. While Immigration and Customs Enforcement places only about 1 percent of its jailed immigrants in solitary, this practice is nonetheless startling because those detainees are being held on civil, not criminal, charges.

The National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) will have a second chance at a representation election at Kaiser Permanente. And it's because the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) will be holding a revote of a 2010 representation election between NUHW and SEIU-UHW where the latter prevailed by violating the law and colluding with Kaiser to rig the vote. There is no nice way to say it. These are the facts.

China held its most important political meetings in ten years with the Communist Party Congress in Nov. and the National People's Congress in March 2013. A new leadership group assumed power: Xi Jinping is the new CPC general secretary and national president, Li Kejiang the premier of the state council. New officials assumed all but two positions in the political bureau's standing committee. A major decision is that China will change its economic development strategy.

Congress has backed a continuing resolution that pushes back against the current push to end Saturday delivery. But this “fix” is only temporary. And there are more threats on the horizon.The founding document is clear. Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 gives Congress the power and the responsibility: “To establish Post Offices and post Roads.”

March 8 is International Women's Day, launched a century ago by the international workers' movement. To mark the occasion, the UE NEWS asked labor historian Rosemary Feurer to write about the legendary labor organizer Mother Jones. When Mother Jones was mocked as the "grandmother of all agitators," in the U.S. Senate, Mother Jones replied that she would someday like to be called "the great-grandmother of all agitators."

Wal-Mart Stores Inc has sued a major grocery workers union and others who have protested at its Florida stores, the latest salvo in its legal fight to stop "disruptive" rallies in and around its stores by groups seeking better pay and working conditions.

If policymakers don’t discover new methods of ensuring fair economic opportunity, the workers of the world may just unite. Marx may yet have his revenge.

As the medical device tax saga shows, cutting loopholes is really hard to do in practice. They were likely put there to benefit specific industries, which can often be quite powerful and influence even stalwart liberal Senators who claim to want new revenue sources. Many progressives thus fear that the loopholes most likely to be closed are the ones that benefit people without lobbyists—middle-class wage earners and homeowners, students, and the very poor.