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President Barack Obama wants workers to make more money. Walmart and other low-wage employers also want to make more money.

They could both get what they want if the federal minimum wage goes up.

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.

It's hard to believe in the power of organized labor if you've grown up over the past thirty years, a period of steady union decline. Conventional wisdom hold that the new service economy is inherently hostile terrain for labor organizers and, more broadly, that Americans just aren't the joiners they used to be. (Lots of civil society institutions have withered, not just unions.)

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.” [...]

The deep racial segregation of America's schools is such a difficult challenge because it is so driven by economics: Many families of color simply can't afford to live in white or mixed neighborhoods. Zoning rules also play a big role, with white communities often making it difficult to contruct more affordable multi-family apartment units. 

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.

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.

U.S. society seems to have given up on school desegregation -- which has been intensifying.

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.