States used to have the authority to enforce usury laws, capping the excessive interest rates of any lender interested in transacting business with their citizens. Although usury laws are still on the books in some states across the country, when it comes to credit cards they are rendered useless by

In America, employees have the right to stick together to form unions and bargain collectively. At least, we’ve got those rights on paper. In practice, many employers routinely violate rights to organize, threatening, harassing, and illegally firing workers, whenever employees try to band together.

If you're part of the 9-to-5 crowd, chances are you wish you had more flexibility. But many low-income workers have the exact opposite problem: their hours vary wildly and they rarely know if they will get a full forty hours of work in a given week. Or even get work at all.

Come April 2014, New Yorkers will finally have the right to get sick. Thanks to a New York City Council vote last night overriding Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s veto, New York will become the largest city in the nation to guarantee paid sick days. It’s an important milestone, even for those of us

For the past half century, one of the surest paths to well-heeled financial security was becoming a corporate lawyer. Your class background didn't matter all that much, as long as you were smart enough to get into a top law school and could then endure the brutal hours of an associate at a corporate

Workers at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center filed a complaint with the Labor Department on Monday alleging a slew of labor violations against their employers, including not being paid the minimum wage and working as many as 80 hours a week without overtime pay. The Reagan

When employers check credit as part of their hiring it creates a vicious cycle: out-of-work Americans can’t pay down their debts because they don’t have a job, but they can’t get a job because would-be employers hold their consumer credit history against them.

NEW YORK -- At a gathering of state leaders in Baltimore, Maryland, last week, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley made a strong case in support of the growing movement to rethink and re-orient how we measure economic performance and social progress, which he argues is a crucial step forward in

One of the most pernicious myths of the past half century is that guaranteeing healthcare for all Americans would strike a mortal blow against this country's system of free enterprise.

In a keynote address last Friday in Baltimore, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley broke down the reasons behind his administration’s decision to make Maryland the first state in the union to employ a Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), a quantitative assessment that integrates both the costs and the