Portside

New Labor Forum’s “Working-Class Voices” columnist Kressent Pottenger interviewed Narbada Chhetri, former nail salon worker and director of Organizing and Advocacy at Adhikaar (a social justice organization based in New York City with approximately eight hundred members serving the Nepalese and Tibetan community), and Pabitra Dash, nail salon worker and organizer at Adhikaar, about the poor working conditions of nail salon workers in the United States. Highlights of the interview follow.

Happy birthday Open Source; FBI is reading this; SOS FOIA; Say it loud; Bitcoin bubble; Free speech and attacks on democracy

Bargaining for the common good campaigns are when union and community groups together leverage contract negotiations for broader, shared gains.

The Young Karl Marx is a nuanced and surprisingly accurate portrait of the revolutionary as a young man.

Amazon's high-tech sheen hides its abusive labor practices.

In the end, Trump’s infrastructure plan is simply another in the long line of policies designed to benefit the private sector, and keep the public sector sufficiently small and ineffective that it can be controlled and contained by plutocrats.

The late Italian philosopher's concept of hegemony was startlingly prescient.

“The Catholic bishops of the United States have long and consistently supported the right of workers to organize for purposes of collective bargaining,” a U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops says.brief says. “Because this right is substantially weakened by so-called ‘right-to-work’ laws, many bishops - in their dioceses, through their state conferences, and through their national conference - have opposed or cast doubt on such laws, and no U.S. bishop has expressed support for them.”

It’s easy to forget that California is a state with the death penalty on its books, and it’s not hard to see why. The state has not executed anyone in 12 years as January 2018. Nevertheless, California has sentenced nearly 1,000 people to death since the current system was adopted in 1978. There have been 13 executions in that time, and we currently house more people under sentences of death than any other jurisdiction in the Western Hemisphere.

On January 11 of this year, the eve of the anniversary, Donald Trump reportedly described Haiti to a group of lawmakers in the White House as a “shithole country.” At about the same time, his immigration agents in New York were detaining the popular Trinidadian-born activist Ravi Ragbir, the executive director of the faith-based New York Sanctuary Coalition. A week earlier they had detained another of the organization’s activists, the Haitian-born Jean Montrevil.