Walmart employees and their supporters have planned national protests today to demand an increase of their wages. Here is why the average American should support the workers’ demands.
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.
"Not only the absence of oppression but the presence of opportunity"
In his speech at the Lincoln Memorial the President movingly honored the sacrifice and commitment of the people who marched on Washington fifty years ago today. He was emphatic in noting that the progress has been immense, an accomplishment that belongs not only to the leaders of the movement but the ordinary people who “never appeared in the history books.”
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.
If I were a top executive in the retail or restaurant industries, or one of their hired guns in Washington, I'd be very nervous right now.
Tomorrow will see what may be the first-ever national strike against restaurant and retail chains, with workers expected to walk off the jobs in 35 cities -- including at retail giants like Sears, Macy's, and Walmart.
As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs today, it is remarkable to note how the challenges faced by activists 50 years ago are so similar to those we face today. But instead of being deflated by this reality, and progress has been made for sure, this anniversary is an invaluable reminder of how change can be made.
Long after he left the governorship of Alabama, George Wallace -- the leading segregationist of the Jim Crow era -- apologized and repented for his racism. Among the statements he regretted was his famous vow in his 1963 inaugural address: "segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."
It was Wallace's escalation of the civil rights battle in 1963, among other things, that brought 200,000 marchers to Washington.
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, an event usually associated with the fight for civil rights and integration, but one that also put economic opportunity and equality at its forefront. As a historian, I know we enjoy stories of change over time. Some insist we can’t have history without it. Thus, it seems fitting to ask: what has changed in economic inequality for Black America over the last half century?
Fast food companies keep employees at poverty-level wages while reaping billions of dollars in profits. It drives inequality, slows growth, and lowers living standards.
Fifty years after the "dream" of racial equality invoked by Martin Luther King at the March on Washington, the reality is that African-Americans still suffer the most unemployment.
Government statistics show the overall US unemployment rate stood at 7.4 percent in July.
But while whites had a jobless rate of 6.6 percent last month, the rate was nearly double for blacks at 12.6 percent.
By comparison, the Hispanic, or Latino, minority fared better, with 9.1 percent unemployed.
If we comparison shop for clothes and cars, why can't we do the same for something as serious as prices for the most common medical procedures? Until very recently, these prices were a closely guarded secret, secluded in a unwieldy, outdated government database that interested researchers had to pay to access. This secrecy has a variety of consequences for all Americans, but particularly the uninsured.
Right now, eager 18-year-olds from across the country are tweeting with bravado photos of their newly postered dorm rooms and scanning with private fear their freshmen class schedules. They're embarking on a journey to capture their piece of the American Dream.
