Walmart, enmeshed in a debate over low wages highlighted by a food drive for employees at a Canton store, can significantly raise the salaries of sales clerks and other workers without having to find additional money for the pay hikes, says a research brief by a think tank.

Wal-Mart could afford to hike every U.S. employee’s hourly wage to at least $14.89 an hour just by not repurchasing its own stock, according to a new report from the progressive think tank Demos.

Walmart can easily afford to raise pay for its low-wage workers by $5.83 an hour, to an average wage of $14.89, a new report from progressive think tank Demos concludes. All the retail giant has to do is stop its massive stock buybacks—which only serve to enrich a shrinking pool of shareholders, not

A progressive policy research center says that the nation’s largest retailer could easily afford to increase the wages of its employees, if it would choose to avoid “Wall Street financial maneuvers.”

“We are on strike today to have respect and dignity at work,” says Walter Melendez, one of approximately 40 Los Angeles port truck drivers who walked off the job at 5a.m. morning in protest of alleged unfair labor practices. The strikes featured the rolling “ambulatory pickets” that the truckers

A new brief by the national public policy organization Demos analyzes one way Walmart can raise worker pay to meet employees’ $25,000 benchmark target. A Higher Wage is Possible: How Walmart Can Invest in Its Workforce Without Costing Customers a Dime details how Walmart can give workers a raise by

In the past week, both a senior editor at Fortune magazine and the liberal think tank Demos have made similar proposals for how Walmart could greatly increase worker wages without harming its business prospects.

You can explain the current plight of the American middle class in three sentences. Timothy Egan did in the New York Times this week:

Here's a question for every reader of this post who lives in a major metro area and has at least a college degree: How many people do you know who make under $40,000 a year? Exclude that artist friend who's husband is in finance. And eliminate younger people still paying their dues. I'm talking

Give them jobs. That's the most important answer to the serious economic crisis gripping young America, which faces double digit unemployment rates for some groups -- levels rivaling that of the Great Depression. Of course, creating jobs sounds very complicated -- a multi-part process of