Media

Stories of voter purge attempts and voter bullying across the country.

Even though the ads are gone and the election season is over (for now), the distorting impact of all that ad money permeates our entire political process.

With the holiday shopping season fast approaching,Demos has released a new report showing how raising wages in the retail sector would benefit not just workers but the economy as a whole. The study looks at what would happen if the lowest-paid retail employees earned $25,000 a year (the current average is $21,000 for retail sales people and just $18,500 for cashiers).

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.

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.

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.

Walmart is by far the nation's largest retailer, with 2.2 million employees (the next largest is Target with 365,000), and its low wages have set the tone for a nation where the majority of jobs created in the so-called economic recovery pay less than $13.83 per hour.

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.