Portside

The death of the labor movement has been repeatedly predicted as an imminent event for more than a century. Yet it lives, and is getting stronger.

Cambodian garment workers have been engaged in militant workplace actions to demand higher wages. Despite anti-union violence, including killings and arrests, workers continue to strike for better wages and working conditions.

A group of workers employed by a Microsoft contractor successfully organized a union -- a rare feat in the tech industry -- and is now bargaining with its company over a contract.

A simple, broad labor statement of unity — supporting New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's efforts, the right in a democracy to protest against police brutality and the good work of the majority of decent police officers, and calls for a new campaign to regulate handguns like the one used to murder two policemen and a citywide dialogue on racism and policing — is in order.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued long-awaited new rules to modernize and streamline union certification elections and to eliminate the worst cases of pre-election delay. The board is mandated to protect the rights of employees to form unions and bargain collectively, but numerous academic studies have demonstrated that the current NLRB election process fails to protect workers' free choice.

Unions historically have supported minimum wage and occupational safety laws that benefited all workers, not just their members. But they also have recently begun investing major resources in organizing drives more likely to yield new laws than new members. Some of these campaigns seek to organize workers who, rightly or wrongly, aren't even designated as employees or lack a common employer, such as domestic workers and cab drivers.

Food service workers at Harvard are members of UNITE-HERE Local 26. After two years, they earn $21.73 per hour on average, while for many years the DoubleTree hotel in Cambridge owned by the university non-union housekeepers earned only about $15 an hour. Last year, housekeepers at the hotel mounted a push to join Local 26 as well. Hilton, which owns the DoubleTree chain bumped salaries to $18 an hour— but has so far managed to avoid a unionized workforce.