Portside

Donald Trump's draconian immigration enforcement efforts face a basic challenge: the United States operates within an economic system that profits off immigrant labor. Immigrant labor is more vital to many industries than it's ever been before. Today, about 57% of the country's entire agricultural workforce is undocumented. But the list of other industries dependent on immigrant labor is long.

Reader Comments: Resisting a Dictator; Moringa; Free Speech, Hate, Anarchism and Mass Movements; Building Trades and Labor; Working Women; Labor and Climate Convergence; Announcements; and more...

For a generation after World War II, America was far more equal than we are today. Can we ever get that back? Of course we can—the obstacles are political, not economic.

Reader Comments: Labor Movement, Unions and Trump; Coal Miner's Heritage; North Carolina; More on the Rockettes; Protests and Social Security; Progressives, Neoliberalism and the Broadest Fight Against Trump-readers exchange; Vietnam War;

With the election of Donald Trump, labor faces a unique opportunity. It will face hostility in all branches of the federal government, and will have to maintain a multi-pronged fight. Yes, union density numbers are at historically low levels, and the bulwark of public-sector unionism may suffer a major blow at the Supreme Court through a case challenging the constitutionality of fair-share fees in the public sector...It has the existential imperative to reform itself.

Reader Comments: Not a Revolution - Yet; Hamilton; Enabling Neo-Fascists; Slavery, Democracy, the Electoral College; Understanding the U.S. Working Class; This Was Not a Working Class Revolt; Remembering Tony Mazzocchi; Social Security is NOT Going Broke; Labor Leaders Deserve Their Share of the Blame; Honor the Thousands of Undocumented Workers; Venezuela; Flu Shots: Facts & Fallacies; and more.. Announcement: What Happened? What Now? - Labor Forum with Bill Fletcher

Reader Comments: Analyzing a Very Close Election; What Now, What Next?; Revenge of the Forgotten Class - What Impacted How White Workers Voted?; A Message from the Past for us Today - from A.J. Muste; Announcements: 2016 Election Debrief; Announcing the AltoTrump.com Website; The Spanish Civil War & the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: 80 Years Later; Puerto Rico: Facts and Realities of Living Under PROMESA; Clemency for Leonard Peltier - week of actions; and more...

Supporting Native Americans and their tribes, environmental, climate protection, human rights, and many other groups joined the campaign against the pipeline. The Obama administration intervened to temporarily halt the pipeline. The Dakota Access Pipeline has become an issue of contention within organized labor. Why has this become a divisive issue within labor, and can it have a silver lining for a troubled labor movement?

Reader Comments: AFL-CIO Constituency Groups Stand with Native Americans to Stop the Dakota Access Pipeline; Largest Prison Strike in History Draws Attention to Unpaid Labor; Sanders Says: Elect Clinton-Then Mobilize; Invisible Workforce: Death, Discrimination and Despair in Temp Industry; Announcements: Dollars&Sense - Annual Labor Issue; Studs Terkel; Many Rivers to Cross: Art & Social Justice Festival; Blood in the Water: Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy