“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

Washington is in its usual state of hysteria this week -- now over the Obamacare rollout -- so, as usual, few people in power are talking about the biggest problem facing the country: a still-stagnant labor market that has stranded millions in a jobless hell, with real unemployment rates for some

As a retiree with a defined-benefit pension; a former public employee who defended public workers’ pension benefits for decades; and an advocate who, after leaving the Service Employees International Union, chose to spend several years trying to create a national effort to build a new all-American

Wal-Mart Stores is the country’s biggest private employer. Its low wages have incited labor protests and congressional criticism, and have created a cottage industry of public policy research.

Generational theft has occurred on a massive scale.