At this point, it's hardly news that Walmart is a pioneer of modern union-busting. And the revelation that Walmart has illegally disciplined 80 workers since June -- including firing 20 -- for their involvement in union activity is no surprise.
Here’s another example of how money corrupts the electoral system: a pro-business special interest group has spent almost $7 million on New York City Council races.
The American middle class has been in trouble for decades, but this was not obvious until the recession of 2008 because consumer purchases held up. How was that possible? The simple answer is that financiers devised ways to loan money that severed the link between profits and middle-class wellbeing.
Seniors are getting squeezed in so many ways. Healthcare and other basic expenses are rising. Fewer have pensions to supplement their Social Security income in retirement. Low interest rates mean what savings they do have isn’t growing quickly — unless they are willing to invest in higher-risk financial products.
Paying workers more would lead to lower profits and layoffs for America's biggest corporations, right? Not necessarily.
Critics of a minimum wage hike cite a commonly held belief that forcing low-paying employers such as Wal-Mart to boost compensation would lead to greater economic suffering. Higher labor costs, they argue, would require higher prices, prompting layoffs and more pain.
Most research on rising economic inequality focuses on growing wage gaps between different groups of workers. But of course that is only part of the story. Just as important is the division of the national economic pie between profits going to capitalists and the “labor share” that includes all of the wages and benefits earned by workers.
We famously live an age of capital, where those who own businesses or other assets are prospering, while most people who rely on the value of their labor are doing terribly.
Walmart employees and their supporters have planned national protests today to demand an increase of their wages. Here is why the average American should support the workers’ demands.
After decades of seeing their incomes shrink, those at the bottom of the economic ladder are starting to band together and fight back — and it’s one of the most important economic stories of our time.
If there’s one thing you can say about Art Pope, North Carolina’s mega-donor, it’s that he is a man on a mission. Unfortunately, his mission is to use his wealth to make voting more difficult and restrictive and continue the outsized role money plays in politics.
President Obama met with the nation’s top financial regulators last week, to urge for rulings associated with the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform law passed more than three years ago. It was the first time the president convened a sit down with each regulator since 2011.
According to a White House statement, Obama “stressed the need to expeditiously finish implementing the critical remaining portions of Wall Street Reform to ensure we are able to prevent the type of financial harm that lead to the Great Recession from ever happening again.” [...]
Fast food workers in over 50 cities across the nation are striking on Thursday in what organizers are touting as the largest ever strike to hit the industry.
The workers are demanding $15 an hour and the right to unionize, continuing the calls and momentum of a series of strikes that first started in November of 2012.
If I were a top executive in the retail or restaurant industries, or one of their hired guns in Washington, I'd be very nervous right now.
Tomorrow will see what may be the first-ever national strike against restaurant and retail chains, with workers expected to walk off the jobs in 35 cities -- including at retail giants like Sears, Macy's, and Walmart.
"Not only the absence of oppression but the presence of opportunity"
In his speech at the Lincoln Memorial the President movingly honored the sacrifice and commitment of the people who marched on Washington fifty years ago today. He was emphatic in noting that the progress has been immense, an accomplishment that belongs not only to the leaders of the movement but the ordinary people who “never appeared in the history books.”
In the spring of 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, to join sanitation workers seeking better pay, fairer treatment and the right to form a union.
I was with Dr. King as he stood with workers, all African-American, all fighting years of labor repression and wages that relegated them to poverty. Dr. King was assassinated on that trip to Memphis. His death, just as the images of workers carrying signs reading, "I am a man," is forever seared in my memory.