Portside

As many as 400 workers at more than 60 fast food restaurants in the Detroit metro area walked off the job on Friday. The fast food strike in Detroit is the second major labor action to hit an American city’s fast food industry this week: On Wednesday and Thursday, more than 100 workers in St. Louis walked off the job at roughly 30 different restaurants. These rolling walkouts followed similar actions in New York, central Pennsylvania, and Chicago.

Protest goes international

The agreements with actors and writers represent a capitulation by Hollywood’s biggest companies, which started the bargaining process with an expectation that the unions, especially SAG-AFTRA, would be relatively compliant.

In the early 1900s, Ford Motor Company commanded strong loyalty from Detroit’s black workers. But the United Auto Workers broke Ford’s stranglehold through patient organizing, cementing an alliance that would bear fruit for decades.

The horror sinks in around the world

Glacier v. Teamsters was not a crisis averted but another step in the right’s plan to stifle labor power.

America is in the midst of the biggest surge in labor activity in a quarter-century. Auto workers, writers, actors, Starbucks workers, Amazon workers, UPS drivers, flight attendants – labor isn’t a ‘special interest’. It’s all of us.