This is supposed to be a cheery season for retailers. Not at Wal-Mart (WMT), though, where it’s been a really bad week—and this is only Wednesday.
On Monday, the Cleveland Plain Dealer broke the news of a holiday food drive at an Ohio Walmart store—for its own employees. The newspaper story, including a photo of the bins set out for the donations, quickly made its way pretty much everywhere. And it came from OUR Walmart, a group of union-backed employees pushing for higher wages and better working conditions.
“We are on strike today to have respect and dignity at work,” says Walter Melendez, one of approximately 40 Los Angeles port truck drivers who walked off the job at 5a.m. morning in protest of alleged unfair labor practices. The strikes featured the rolling “ambulatory pickets” that the truckers have excelled at—chasing down trucks as they leave the port and setting up picket lines in front of them.
In the past week, both a senior editor at Fortune magazine and the liberal think tank Demoshave made similar proposals for how Walmart could greatly increase worker wages without harming its business prospects.
There are few better ways to uncover fraud in an industry than to incentivize insiders to blow the whistle on wrongdoing. And a little known part of Dodd-Frank did just that for the securities industry, creating a new whistleblower program run by the SEC that can bestow huge rewards on anyone who brings to light evidence of fraud that results in a settlement.
In today's global economy, a victory for workers anywhere is a victory everywhere. Why? Because capital's advantage over labor in recent decades has rested on its ability to play workers -- and governments -- off against each other, moving production to wherever wages are lowest. That advantage will endure as long as poor countries with huge populations lack strong labor standards, and offer a hospitable home to sweatshops.
Progressives have typically attacked economic inequality on fairness grounds, arguing that it's just not right that so much national wealth is funneled to the top even as millions struggle to get by.
Credit card fees can be expensive and annoying, there’s no doubt about it. But many of them can be avoided if you’re careful and others may be worth paying if you get something worthwhile. For example, many of the best rewards credit cards charge annual fees, but people who use them frequently are able to earn additional rewards that outweigh the extra cost.
By some measures, public trust of government is now at its lowest point ever recorded. To be sure, this partly reflects a concerted thirty year assault on government by conservatives. But it also reflect legitimate public doubts about the ability of government to solve problems -- doubts that are being reinforced by the calamitous rollout of the Affordable Care Act.
Most people think of sequestration as imposing across-the-board cuts of 5 to 7 percent, a figure that doesn't sound all that alarming. While that's technically correct, what's now becoming clear is how the cuts have ramifications far larger than the 5 to 7 percent figure would suggest. This is the finding a big new study on sequestration by NDD United, a coalition that works to protect non-defense domestic spending.
The co-chair of the Moreland Commission set up to investigate campaign finance issues in New York, William Fitzpatrick, is a Republican, fiscal conservative, and a recent convert to public financing. Fitzpatrick stated, “If the money's not there, I'm inclined not to spend it.
The establishment consensus is accurately summarized by Martin Feldstein, “Preventing an explosion of the national debt requires slowing the growth of the benefits of middle-class retirees.” But the truth is that the middle class and poor need more help than ever.
There aren't a lot of causes that can fire up Americans across the political spectrum, but getting money out of politics is definitely one of them. That's the finding of a recent poll-based memo by the DemocracyCorps.
A majority of Americans see Washington as corrupt, the memo reports, and many blame "moneyed interests" for that corruption -- believing both parties are deeply compromised.
Perhaps the most striking fact from the exit polls last Tuesday is just how well Democrats did among highly educated voters. In Virginia, Terry McAuliffe won voters with a postgradudate degree by 22 points. In New Jersey, the Democratic candidate lost high school and college grads by double digit margins, but nearly drew even with Chris Christie among the postgrad crowd. Forty-eight percent of these voters went for Barbara Buono, compared to 36 percent of voters with just a high school degree.
Here's a basic conundrum facing progressives right now: We're the people who want more big government, yet populist anger at all major institutions -- public and private -- is the most powerful current in politics today. How do we square that circle?