Media

As planned Black Friday strikes draw increasing media attention, Walmart continues to publicly dismiss the actions as stunts and the workers involved as an unrepresentative fringe. But workers charge that behind closed doors, the company is waging a stepped-up campaign to to intimidate them out of striking. That includes both alleged illegal threats and punishments, and likely legal mandatory meetings designed to discourage workers from joining the Black Friday rebellion.

Requiring people to show government issued photo identification in order to vote is unnecessary, discriminatory and has the potential to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of people.

For years now, we've been hearing that single parenthood is at the root of American poverty. If unmarried mothers would just settle down, the argument went, then our national poverty rate would go down, too. But new data show how wrong that argument is. Half of poor parents raising kids under 18 are now married, according to the report just released from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The poverty rate for married couples with children is going up, having increased 47 percent since 2000.

It’s the biggest shopping season on the calendar and retail companies are expecting hundreds of billions of dollars in sales. To meet this demand, retail pulls in around 600,000 seasonal workers on top of a workforce of 15 million.  This massive work force is majority female and fairly diverse – people of color comprise about 30 percent of workers in the sector.  It is also low-paid. 

By 2020, more than one-quarter of U.S. workers will be working low-wage jobs, not making enough money to keep a family of four out of poverty.

Retail companies don't have to choose between high wages and high profits, argues a new report from the researchers at Demos.

In Retail’s Hidden Potential, policy analyst Catherine Ruetschlin says that higher wages across the retail industry would create jobs and reduce poverty without cutting significantly into employers’ profit margins.

Black Friday has heaped new pressure on big box stores to bump up worker pay, with a group of Walmart employees plotting a walkout on the country’s biggest shopping day and the think tank Demos releasing a study Monday that touts the benefits of higher wages.

If Walmart and other major retailers would just raise worker wages to a livable level, not only would 700,000 people be lifted out of poverty, but the economy and retail sales would grow. That's the conclusion of a new report by Demos' Catherine Ruetschlin, anyway. And her argument has backup in today's retail industry:

How and why large financial institutions damage the middle class even if there is no financial crisis.