“Working moms” employed by the world's biggest retailer, Walmart, have walked off their jobs in a number of cities across the United States. Union organizers said employees walked picket lines Wednesday throughout the day in 20 cities including Tampa, Miami, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
Under the banner of "Walmart moms," mothers who work at Walmart launched strikes in 20 cities across the United States on Wednesday to protest what they say are poverty wages and routine policies of retaliation against workers who organize. From Chicago to Pittsburgh to Miami, the mass actions were part of rolling strikes launched last Friday by Our Walmart members.
Walmart workers speaking at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Bentonville, Arkansas, on Friday said the megastore’s staffing problems and poor pay were hurting the company’s image and contributing to lagging sales.
Their statement comes after a week of rallies across the country by labor activists, union representatives and workers in cities such as Chicago; Dayton, Ohio; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The demonstrators have taken aim at the plight of the company’s low-wage employees and the burden they say Walmart’s staffing policies place on working mothers.
Walmart has grown from a single store in Rogers, Arkansas, into a massive American institution. It takes in more money per year than most countries produce in GDP. It employs 1.4 million people, or nearly 1 in 100 American workers. Its stores cover 1.1 billion square feet.
There was a lot of pomp and circumstance at Walmart's (WMT) shareholder meeting Friday. In the "pomp" department, over 20,000 of Walmart employees were treated to a star-studded spectacle featuring Pharrell, Robin Thicke, Florida Georgia Line, Sarah McLachlan and Harry Connick Jr., among others.
Heather McGhee, president of Demos: When Sheryl Sandberg and Jill Abramson—women leading powerful institutions in male-dominated industries—ignite our most robust media conversations about gender equality, we feminists face a quandary. Of course feminists want women who are tantalizingly close to the top to break through, and of course we know that the paucity of women leading our institutions is a glaring symbol of enduring gender hierarchy. But women will not succeed in dismantling one hierarchy by climbing to the top of another.
As the White House convenes its summit on the issues facing working families this week, it’s easy to feel discouraged. The proposals topping the agenda–paid leave, flexible work, childcare–are all great ideas. The problem is they’re the same great ideas advocates have been suggesting for years—decades, even.
Today's polarized debates about the role of government often boil down to a single issue: the size of government compared with the size of the overall economy, as measured in gross domestic product.
There was a lot of pomp and circumstance at Walmart's (WMT) shareholder meeting Friday.
In the "pomp" department, over 20,000 of Walmart employees were treated to a star-studded spectacle featuring Pharrell, Robin Thicke, Florida Georgia Line, Sarah McLachlan and Harry Connick Jr., among others.
As the nation’s trillion-dollar student debt continues to rise, a new analysis of public higher education’s funding finds dwindling state support is the key factor driving rising tuition costs and deepening student debt.
President Obama signed an executive order Monday that could extend student debt relief to an additional 5 million people — a move aimed in part at better educating young borrowers of their rights while jumpstarting a moribund debate on the issue in Congress.
Big news! President Obama announced an Executive Order this afternoon that would extend the protections of Income-Based Repayment to an estimated five million more student borrowers.
Competition and innovation in bank payments risk being undermined if the system’s new regulator is too heavy handed, a report from Demos Finance warns.
The government is setting up a regulator to ensure new and smaller banks get a fair deal when using larger rivals’ systems. But analysts at Demos worry some actions to address this could backfire, prompting banks to withdraw services rather than comply. The think tank also wants the new regulator to consider potential uses for collecting tax data.
This week, President Obama ordered changes to the federal student loan program that could help millions of borrowers make their payments more affordable starting in December 2015.
For young adults who entered the workforce between the start of the Great Recession in 2009 to the present, days spent searching for jobs — any jobs at all — have stretched into weeks, months and even years. This endless disappointment seems to be the new normal for a generation of young people who were once assured that if they graduated from high school, attended college and studied hard, they would enjoy gainful employment in the field of their choosing.
A higher federal minimum wage may be a pipe dream in a stalled Congress but with cities and states increasingly raising their own minimums and more workers protesting nationally, President Obama had to get in on the action. For workers employed by federal contractors only Obama issued an executive order this February raising the minimum wage to $10.10. But is that enough? Some of those workers didn’t think so.
A public policy group instrumental in a successful campaign to win a higher minimum wage for federal contract workers is now aiming at a larger target — federal contracting companies.
Demos, in a report released Wednesday, said Uncle Sam could better use his $1.3 trillion in purchasing power by pushing government contractors to improve conditions for their employees.
Once upon a time, the term “government job” was not synonymous with boondoggles, corruption or the perennial “waste, fraud and abuse.” During the New Deal, the state proudly created jobs and spent public money as a vital intervention to check the excesses of market capitalism. Today, the public is disgusted with both fiscal policy and the free market.
Stymied by the partisan gridlock, President Obama’s recent directives to bar federal contractors from discriminating against gay employees and to cut carbon pollution are bold examples of how presidents have used their executive powers to address critical issues when Congress has failed to adopt much-needed legislation.