Portside

The election at the LA Times comes on the heels of a recent spate of successful media union drives.

Instead of being sufficiently innovative, says Seattle SEIU Local 775 David Rolf, most labor leaders have been “reinvesting and doubling down on our American system of enterprise-based collective bargaining since the union movement started to shrink in the early 1950s.” The result: “Through decades . . . we’ve seen unions grow weaker and weaker every year while continuing to repeat the same strategic directions.”

In an echo of national worker's rights movements such as Fight for $15 and OUR Walmart, New Orleans hospitality workers are coming together in an attempt to rearrange the building blocks of their industry. Both on their own and with the support of a union, workers are becoming their own advocates, in an effort to — as Marlene Patrick-Cooper, the local organizing director for the UNITE HERE union, often says — "turn poverty jobs into middle-class jobs."

UE, the union organizing the Second City workers, has recently helped run several successful unionization campaigns with service employees whose jobs are precarious and without benefits, including graduate student workers in Iowa and movie theater concession workers in New England.

With teachers facing similar attacks in school districts across the country, it makes sense to share strategies for fighting back. That’s the goal of the United Caucuses of Rank-and-File Educators (UCORE), a growing network of locals and caucuses within the teachers unions.

United Automobile Workers fails in bid to organize in southern car plant. New charges with National Labor Relations Board could prompt new vote.

While student activism can’t be a lone focal point of a broader social justice movement, defending higher education and organizing on campus is still of tantamount importance for the Left.

Teachers at Cesar Chavez Prep will be the first teachers at a charter school in the District to unionize.

Chris Brooks of Labor Notes interviews Susan Williams, an educator who has worked at the Highlander Center for 28 years about popular education, organizing and movement history. Popular education is "based on the belief that people can do more than they think they can."