● "Side hustle" as a sign of the apocalypse.

● Charles Pierce on the Betsy DeVos hearing:

It was not a hearing. It was the mere burlesque of a hearing, rendered meaningless by a preposterously accelerated process that rendered all questioning perfunctory and that left all cheap evasions hanging in the air of the committee room the way cigarette smoke used to canopy the proceedings back in the day. You would not hire a gardener through the process by which Betsy DeVos likely is going to become the Secretary of Education. A public school system wouldn't hire her to work the cafeteria line at lunch. It was appalling. It was unnerving. It was a grotesque of how an evolved democracy should operate. It was business as usual these days and it likely isn't going to matter a damn.

● Fascinating piece on "America's great working-class colleges":

To take just one encouraging statistic: At City College, in Manhattan, 76 percent of students who enrolled in the late 1990s and came from families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution have ended up in the top three-fifths of the distribution. These students entered college poor. They left on their way to the middle class and often the upper middle class.

● Trump's labor secretary could be a disaster for restaurant workers.

● How the American Postal Workers Union scored one of its biggest wins ever.

● Interviews for resistance: Don’t just march this weekend—strike!

● In Connecticut hotels and cafeterias, recruiting a rank-and-file army of organizers.

● Sociologist Jake Rosenfeld on anti-union legislation in Missouri:

It’s clear that some unions do a lot better at motivating their covered members to pay their dues than in other cases. Given the political head winds right now, every union out there facing the threat of a right to work law should be sending staff and calling up those unions that do a good job of getting their members motivated and excited to contribute to the organization that provides their representation.

● More on Betsy DeVos:

A characteristic DeVos move in Lansing traces a familiar pattern. A piece of legislation suddenly appears courtesy of a family ally. It pops up late in the session, late at night, or better still, during lame duck, when the usual legislative horse trading shifts into overdrive. So it was with a controversial bill that popped up 2013, doubling the limits for campaign contributions—a limit that no one in Michigan was wealthy enough to hit. Well almost no one. The GOP jammed the measure through, Governor Snyder signed it, and it took effect immediately. *The DeVoses then got their whole clan together and held a check writing party,* recalls Jeff Irwin, a Democratic state representative from Ann Arbor who was recently term-limited out. *It was a love letter to the richest people in Michigan and they delivered with a huge thank you.*

● Workers Independent News: