Portside

The current crisis facing the public sector, a major location of African American workers, along with the crisis facing organized labor, should present a moment to reconsider old assumptions. A multi-union effort to organize Southern public sector workers could be something close to a game-changer on several levels, not the least being the potential impact on Southern politics and Southern unionization. And, as the saying goes, as goes the South, so goes the USA.

Leo Robinson was a leader of the longshore union in San Francisco. He died this week. For many of us, he was an example of what being an internationalist and a working-class activist was all about.