Portside

Summary - Reader Comments - Big Lie about Mayor Bill de Blasio and Charters; Ukraine; Disgraceful Rejection of Debo Adegbile; Salt of the Earth - Sixty Years and Still So Vibrant; Attack on Public Schools; Member-to-Member Harassment; NAFTA Scorecard; Vermont Public Bank; Women in Labor History; 25th Anniversary of the Web; Today in History - Senate Approves Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty

Human rights activists say the highly anticipated legislation doesn't do enough to protect workers.

Beyond just better wages, the workers at the forefront of the FFF campaign are demanding to be treated with greater respect and dignity.

They set up their tents and mattresses on the sidewalk in Long Island City, Queens, unpacked their Coronas and cards – and settled in to wait as long as five days and nights for a slender chance at a union job as an elevator mechanic.

Called the “Ride for Respect,” the demonstration at Walmart corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, will be modeled on civil rights volunteers who rode buses into the South in the 1960s to protest Jim Crow racial injustice.

Netflix’s new House of Cards series offers an inside look at Beltway power games and is far better than most of this genre---which is why its retrograde and even racist union-bashing is so unfortunate.

Strip off the gloss and you have a workforce of young women classified as independent contractors, not covered by minimum wage laws, who are often paid in clothes rather than cash, and are in debt to their modeling agencies.