The soaring pay of corporate chief executives is spurring efforts to pass laws to limit their compensation and close the widening gap in earnings between workers and top executives.
Such laws have been proposed in at least three states, including Massachusetts, as well as in Switzerland. Proponents have yet to succeed in enacting these measures, but they vow to keep pressing the issue. [...]
For a moment last week, it looked like Walmart CEOs were getting enlightened. The company promised to “end minimum-wage pay” for its lowest-paid sales workers and touted a plan to ‘”invest in its associate base” and maybe even offer more bonus opportunities.
Six years after America sank into the deepest economic downturn since the 1930s, the jobless rate has fallen to 5.9 percent, the lowest since July 2008. But one demographic group — African-American men — seems to be stuck in a permanent recession.
How bad a problem is inequality? Are working-class people getting screwed? Should we raise taxes on the rich? Is the United States, in short, a fundamentally unfair place? These are the questions that keep awake policy analysts and fuel endless dinner-party debates. But there's one group that is not losing very much sleep over them: rich folks.
The FDIC estimates there are 10 million people living in the U.S. who do not have a bank account — that’s one out of every 13 households. Nearly 33 percent of people living in Starr County, TX can’t write a check. In one census district in Savannah, GA, over 42 percent of residents are unbanked. The unbanked are usually poor, often minorities, and find themselves shunned by banks that can’t make money off them. Typically, they end up turning to predatory check cashers and payday lenders. Many also feel a great sense of social division between themselves and those who have bank accounts.
By offering low-fee checking accounts, Walmart dares to go where most big banks won't. Few major financial institutions are willing to give lower-income Americans checking accounts these days -- without exorbitant fees.
But, unlike the big banks, Walmart really needs low-income customers.
While the de Blasio administration and the City Council work through the details of a bill that would prohibit employers from reviewing the credit histories of potential hires, liberal advocates are pushing for passage of the strongest possible version of the legislation.
It’s the classic Catch-22 of the doomed job search: How do you get a job? You need experience. And how do you get experience? Get a job. But for many, the unemployment cycle gets further twisted when it intersects with the debt cycle. When prospective employers run credit checks, a bad report becomes a financial scarlet letter. ...
A bill that aims to “prohibit discrimination based on one’s consumer credit history” by banning employers from doing credit checks on job applicants will be the subject of a City Council hearing set for 10 a.m. Sept. 12 at City Hall. [...]
According to an article by Amy Traub titled “Discredited: How Employment Credit Checks Keep Qualified Workers Out of a Job,” the practice of checking credit on prospective employees is legal under federal law.
“Demos strongly supports the Democracy for All resolution and calls on all senators to vote to send it to the states for ratification as the Twenty Eighth Amendment.
Providence, RI. Local Cranston residents and the ACLU of Rhode Island won a significant victory today in their fight for equal voting power in City elections when Judge Lagueux of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island denied a motion to dismiss their one person, one vote lawsuit, allowing their case to move forward.
“I’m thrilled this case is going forward,” said Karen Davidson, lead plaintiff. “As a Cranston resident and taxpayer I’m entitled to equal representation and I will keep fighting for it.”
A number of states have laws demanding citizens produce documentary evidence of citizenship to register to vote. These laws have far-reaching implications for voter participation in our democracy.
From here to the Midwest, the actions of law-enforcement authorities form the big political topic of the summer of 2014.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — often labeled a tea party conservative — drew particular attention for his statements on the troubles in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting death of Michael Brown by a white police officer. He linked a “militarization of law enforcement” to a more general “erosion of civil liberties and due process.”
In 2010 and 2011, Maryland and New York took bold steps to correct the problem known as prison gerrymandering, a problem resulting from the United States Census Bureau’s practice of counting incarcerated individuals as residents of their prison cells rather than their home communities.
Los Angeles lawmakers were expected to vote Wednesday on a proposal to renegotiate or terminate an interest rate swap deal from the mid-2000s that critics say now costs the city millions of dollars a year in fees. If successful, the initiative could make the city the nation's largest to challenge ballooning Wall Street levies that accompany similar interest rate swap deals throughout the nation.
(PHOENIX, AZ) – Citing clear evidence that numerous low-income Arizona residents have been denied the opportunity to register to vote, the League of Women Voters of Arizona and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) sent official notice today to Secretary of State Ken Bennett, as well to the heads of three Arizona public assistance agencies (the Department of Economic Security, the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, and the Department of Health Services), that the State is violating the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).
A year after a conservative U.S. Supreme Court majority gutted the crown jewel of the civil rights movement, the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), the nation’s foremost voting rights attorneys say that racial discrimination in voting is rampant, especially in southern states where the the VRA helped to ensure access to the ballot.
Today, President Obama will sign an Executive Order that will encourage federal agencies to not contract with companies that violate labor laws, and require federal contractors to disclose any record of wage, labor and anti-discrimination law violations.