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.
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.
Detroit's debts are a fraction of the $18bn lawyers pushing for bankruptcy say they are, and their costs are "irrelevant, misleading and inflated," according to a report released Wednesday.
A former Wall Street investment banker is taking Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr to task for blaming the city’s financial collapse, in part, on escalating pension and retiree health insurance costs.
The official story about Detroit goes something like this: Decades of mismanagement and out-of-control spending have left the city with a crushing $18 billion in debt.
At the new Walmart superstore in the Chinatown district of Los Angeles, a Thanksgiving turkey costs a little over $30 (£19). The shop is kind enough to distribute ready-made holiday shopping lists to its customers, reminding them to buy cornbread mix and cranberry sauce, ground ginger and pumpkin pie. Yet not everyone can afford to stock their cupboards with each provision on the list – least of all Walmart’s own employees.
Wall Street bankers, bad decisions made by elected officials and the Great Recession should be blamed for contributing to Detroit's fiscal crisis -- not the pensions of workers and retirees.
Walmart has gotten a lot of bad press this week over news of an Ohio store holding a food drive for its own workers, who were unable to buy Thanksgiving groceries on the retail giant's paltry wages. The store managers deserve credit for their thoughtfulness, but wouldn't it be better if Walmart simply paid its workers enough to feed themselves?
“It’s a disgrace that this is happening in a country as rich as ours,” former New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert said, describing what he called a “massive employment crisis” in the U.S.
Herbert, a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the economic equality think tank Demos, delivered his lecture on “A Call to Civic Engagement” as part of SIPA’s Weston lecture series.
Physically large and in charge, Mike Daisey’s performance style suggests a peculiar combination of the late Spalding Gray and Lewis Black of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He sits at a table on a bare stage with some notes and a glass of water and simply tells his story; at times hysterically funny, at others, poignant, withering and accusatory. Some might find his manner a bit loud and overbearing: the night we were there last fall, media moguls Barry Diller and David Geffen were sitting a couple of rows in front of us and walked out after the first fifteen minutes or so.
In November of 2010, New York state’s Domestic Workers Bill of Rights—the first such law in the nation—went into effect, giving some 200,000 nannies, health aides, housekeepers, private cooks, and other at-home workers considerable power to address the poor conditions they often encounter in their unusual workplaces. Around the same time, the Urban Justice Center began holding a monthly legal clinic to help domestic workers file complaints.
State government should offer a retirement plan to the increasing number of people whose companies don't provide a pension or a 401(k) savings program, labor groups and other advocates this week told a legislative panel.
The Labor and Public Employees Committee has raised a bill that would create a task force to study that concept and report back when the 2013 General Assembly session convenes next January.
Some youngsters want to grow up to become artists or athletes or firefighters. Some want to be doctors or dancers. Charles Walker wanted to own a supermarket.
“Ever since I can remember, I wanted my own grocery store,” he said over lunch on a quiet afternoon in snowbound Detroit last year. To Walker, “grocery store” meant a gleaming, well-run supermarket, not necessarily huge but well stocked and scrupulously clean, with fresh meats and produce and first-class customer service.
Former Goldman Sachs employee Greg Smith wrote an op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times that simmers with pathos. Smith describes the devolution of the culture at Goldman: Whereas in the past, the company worked in the interests of its clients, they are now seen merely as the source of transactional profit, to be manipulated for the benefit of the firm.
Cuomo has made the politically expedient shortcut routine for major bills, just months after a judge chastised the practice. Even good-government groups that howled when previous governors used the measure far less frequently accepted it last week, which also happened to be the annual Sunshine Week dedicated to openness in government.
The decision by a governor overrides a committee system in the Senate and Assembly as well as the joint conference committees created under a reform that attempted to force at least some public debate on major policy issues.
Warren Buffett once referred to derivatives as "financial weapons of mass destruction" created by "madmen." Real WMD have rarely been used. However, derivatives are used quite a lot, a $600 trillion per year market dominated by a narrow oligopoly of mega-banks. It appears that Italy got hit by the derivatives WMD in January.
Say you’ve got a booming industry, one that already employs 2 million workers in the U.S. and is poised to add 1.3 million additional jobs by 2020. Imagine that the jobs cannot be off-shored, that the work helps decrease federal deficits, and millions of Americans depend on the industry just to get through their daily lives.
