Portside

In some of the most brutal authoritarian regimes, labor unions have been the anchor of a broad working-class movement for democracy. Think South Africa, Brazil, South Korea. Our worker movements, political movements and unions must be wary of co-optation. We are not here for one-off gains for some of us. We are here to build broader movements for all of us. The minimum wage is a tool for organizing as much as it is a policy outcome.

An investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting found systemic race and gender discrimination throughout the temp industry, including in Chicago.

New paper makes the case that a global billionaire tax is ethical, good for growth, and could solve a lot of the world’s problems. Oh and politically viable.

As we build a movement to thwart Trump and win genuine social change, the activist life of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is instructive.

In theory, mathematics is neutral – two plus two equals four regardless of what anyone wishes the answer was. But in practice, mathematical algorithms can be formulated and tweaked based on powerful interests.

We need a moral movement to create change.

While inequality has become a topic of increased popularity and politicization in recent years, most of the attention has focused on how 1% own an increasingly large share of the world’s wealth, rather than on inequalities between nations. In a global context in which national borders and citizenship pose few barriers to the mobility of capital, the reality is also a story of the world’s richest nations continuing to reap a disproportionate amount of the globe’s profits.

The efforts to flout voter-approved laws are part of ongoing conservative and corporate-backed strategies to keep wages low.

The pro-Republican bias of the Electoral College derives from two main dynamics: it overweights the impact of mostly conservative voters in small population states and it negates entirely the mostly progressive votes of nearly half of African American voters, more than half of Native American voters and a major swath of Latino voters.