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Twelve arrested in protest of Walmart firings and retaliation against activists

Posted on August 23, 2013 by Laura Clawson

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Beginning shortly after the early June strike by around 100 Walmart workers, 20 of the strikers were fired and another 50 were disciplined in retaliation; Walmart basically treated their absences as if they’d been playing hooky rather than engaging in legally protected concerted activity. Now, in a protest against that retaliation, 9 former and one current Walmart workers and two allies have been arrested in planned acts of civil disobedience outside a Washington, D.C., Walmart office Thursday afternoon. The workers are setting a deadline of Labor Day for Walmart to reinstate fired workers and raise wages or face an escalation of worker activism.

Walmart wants to turn this into an argument about labor law, claiming that the workers’ actions constitute “intermittent strikes” that aren’t protected by law. However, Josh Eidelson reports:

Asked in June about Walmart claims that workers were fired for threatening customer service by violating attendance rules, former Obama-appointed NLRB Chair Wilma Liebman said, “the case law doesn’t sustain that as a valid defense” against the charge of illegally punishing strikers. As for the lack of legal protection for “intermittent strikes,” Liebman told The Nation, “I think it would be hard on the facts so far to say that the conduct constitutes intermittent striking.”

By turning this into a dispute about the specifics of labor law, Walmart can both drag things out for months or years before potentially being forced to reinstate the workers and can try to shift the conversation from Walmart’s own rampant abuse of workers and damage to the economy. They’d like to shift the conversation from the workers’ voices, while letting workers who haven’t yet joined the protests and strikes know the cost of doing so:

Another of the fired workers arrested today, Brandon Garrett, yesterday told The Nationthat his termination had taken a toll in his Baker, Louisiana, store: “When we came back from striking and we wasn’t fired right away, even more associates wanted to join the organization. But I guess Walmart got a sense of that, and when they terminated me, they kind of scared a lot of them off.” Now, said Garrett, “they’re still behind us,” but “a lot of them are scared to be retaliated against. So that’s another reason I’m standing up like I am.”

These efforts to change the subject and silence workers are why it’s important to hear what the workers had to say at Thursday’s protest:

Jovani ‘Virtually impossible to go to school with #walmart schedules. We should all be able to pursue our dreams’ #walmartstrikers
— @ForRespect

Pam from CA ‘I am here taking a stand for every Associate too afraid to speak out.’ #walmartstrikers
— @ForRespect

Lucas, gay, out and proud, faced discrimination at #walmart and was fired for speaking out. ‘Today I take a stand.’
— @ForRespect

Tell Walmart and the Walton family to respect workers and pay a real wage.

This article originally appeared on Daily Kos on August 22, 2013. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Laura Clawson is the labor editor at Daily Kos

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McDonald’s Urges Franchises to Open on Christmas Day … Without Overtime Pay

Posted on December 19, 2012 by Mark E. Andersen

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In November McDonald’s saw a 2.5 percent increase in November sales. This is after the fast food giant saw a decrease in sales of 2.2 percent in October. So why was there increase in sales? Was the pork-like substitute McRib back? Was there a shortage of Ore-Ida french fries in your local grocer’s freezer causing a run on McDonald’s across the country?

Nope, none of the above; the corporate overlords at McDonald’s urged franchisees to be open on Thanksgiving day, a day that most franchise stores are closed. A Nov. 8 memo from McDonald’s USA Chief Operating Officer Jim Johannesen stated,

“Starting with Thanksgiving, ensure your restaurants are open throughout the holidays. Our largest holiday opportunity as a system is Christmas Day. Last year, [company-operated] restaurants that opened on Christmas averaged $5,500 in sales.”

On Dec. 12 Mr. Johannesen doubled down and sent out another memo to franchise owners stating that average sales for company-owned restaurants, which compose about 10 percent of its system, were “more than $6,000” this Thanksgiving. That adds up to be about $36 million in extra sales.

So with all those extra sales one must ask if employees are reaping any benefits from being open on the holidays. The answer is dependent on the franchise owner; however, in the case of company owned stores the answer is a big fat no. According to McDonald’s spokesperson Heather Oldani, “when our company-owned restaurants are open on the holidays, the staff voluntarily sign up to work. There is no regular overtime pay.”

It is bad enough that McDonald’s pays crap wages but then they turn around and refuse to pay overtime for employees who volunteer to give up their holidays so that McDonald’s can make several million dollars. I am also willing to bet that most staff does not readily volunteer to work on Christmas day. This just gives me one more reason to not eat at the Golden Arches.

This post was originally posted on December 18, 2012 at The Daily Kos. Reprinted with Permission.

About the Author: Mark E. Andersen is a 44 year old veteran, lifelong Progressive Democrat, Rabid Packer fan, Single Dad, Part-time Grad Student, and Full-time IS worker. Find me on facebook my page is “Kodiak54 (Mark Andersen)”

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Higher minimum wages have been good for jobs in New England

Posted on August 28, 2012August 28, 2012 by Laura Clawson

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Laura Clawson

Here’s one more study that opponents of raising the minimum wage will ignore when they argue that a minimum wage increase would slow job creation. The Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center has looked at minimum wage rates and job creation across New England. Every state in New England has a different minimum wage, ranging from the federal rate of $7.25 in New Hampshire to a high of $8.46 in Vermont. And guess what? States that increased their minimum wages by more and had higher minimum wages did better, not worse, at keeping jobs during the recession and regaining them after the recession. That’s not to say that a higher minimum wage is the only explanation for those results:

Ultimately, a variety of factors affect job growth, and the recession has affected states in different ways. The different rates of employment loss and growth in New England states during this period was likely the result of a variety of factors, but the data do not provide any evidence that higher minimum wages prevent job growth.

This isn’t the first study that’s shown no negative effect, or even a positive outcome, of a higher minimum wage on employment. It won’t be the last. But since opponents of an above-poverty-level minimum wage are much more concerned with profit margins at Walmart and Taco Bell than with creating or losing jobs, the “higher minimum wage is a job-killer” canard isn’t going away any time soon.

(Via We Party Patriots)

This blog originally appeared in Daily Kos Labor on August 20, 2012. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Laura Clawson is labor editor at Daily Kos. She has a PhD in sociology from Princeton University and has taught at Dartmouth College. From 2008 to 2011, she was senior writer at Working America, the community affiliate of the AFL-CIO.

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Workers are worried about having their benefits cut. With good reason.

Posted on August 22, 2012August 22, 2012 by Laura Clawson

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Laura Clawson

Americans’ fears about having their benefits or wages reduced, being laid off, or having work hours cut back shot up in 2009, and haven’t fallen back to pre-2009 levels since, a Gallup poll finds. Benefit cuts lead the list of worries, with 40 percent fearful about that, while wage cuts and layoffs follow at 28 percent.

It’s no wonder that fears about benefit cuts have consistently topped responses to this question since the first time Gallup asked it in 1997. You only have to look at any story about a union’s contract negotiations—companies are overwhelmingly demanding cuts to health insurance and pensions, and they didn’t come for union members’ health insurance and pensions first. Companies worked their way methodically through, cutting benefits to the most vulnerable workers first, selling middle-class professionals on the idea that 401(k) plans would make them investor-class masters of the universe and make pensions obsolete and undesirable.

Union members’ benefits only started getting hit after enough other people’s benefits had been cut that companies could play divide-and-conquer, stoking resentment against workers who still had good benefits, promoting the question “why does my neighbor have a pension when I don’t?” rather than “why did my boss take my pension?” And even as too many people still fall prey to that corporate campaign of division, it may be starting to sink in that once pensions are gone for everyone in the 99 percent, and once even people who have employer-provided health care are paying a bigger chunk of the costs every year until they can’t afford it at all, businesses are coming for something else next. So, yeah. American workers should be worried about benefits. And they should be doing something about that worry—voting, organizing, taking to the fucking streets—before there are no more benefits to be worried about.

This blog originally appeared in Daily Kos Labor on August 22, 2012. Reprinted with permission.

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What is poverty?

Posted on August 20, 2012 by Mark E. Andersen

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Mark E. Anderson What is poverty? According to the federal government poverty for a family of four is $23,050 a year. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, which, if you work a 40-hour week, 52 weeks a year, you would earn $15,080 a year. The average rent cost in the United States is $808 (PDF) a month or $9,696 a year. If you use the thriftiest numbers provided by the USDA (I am assuming this is not a healthy diet) groceries for a family of four averages between $507 and $582 (PDF) a month depending on the age of the children. That is $6,084 to $6,984 a year. Food and lodging for this family of four costs between $15,780 and $16,680 a year. I have not even gotten to childcare costs yet, which for a child who is around four years old ranges $3,900 to $15,540 a year (PDF) a year. There is help for this family of four though, the average amount of SNAP benefits available to a family of four? $496 a month, not enough to pay for all of their groceries, however, it is enough to prevent starvation. Even with SNAP benefits it is obvious that in the family of four only one of the adults can work, as the other has to stay home with the children. I cannot imagine how a single parent at this level of income could keep it together let alone get out of poverty.

Federal Poverty Levels 2012

Those are the numbers that define poverty in America; however, the definition of poverty goes much further than those numbers. The American Heritage dictionary defines poverty as, “the state of being poor; lack of the means of providing material needs or comforts.”

Let that soak in for a minute, “lack of the means of providing material needs or comforts.” Things like food, shelter, and stability. You cannot get sick, you cannot take a day off to go to the doctor, you cannot afford to go to the doctor at all. If the price of food goes up you have to take away from some other part of your budget. But what takes the hit? Is your landlord going to allow you to pay less rent? How do you buy school supplies? How do you get to and from work? None of the figures above include transportation.

Imagine living in a world where you don’t know if you have enough money for your next meal, going without food so that your children may eat. Worrying about scraping together enough money to take your child to the doctor for things that most of us take for granted like immunizations. The feelings of inadequacy when your child wants nothing more than a candy bar and you cannot afford it. How grateful you feel when a stranger hands you a dollar bill to buy that candy bar and how miserable it makes you feel inside that you must depend on the kindness of strangers for such small pleasures in life. How hard birthdays and Christmases are when you cannot afford to purchase even the smallest of gifts (especially in our consumer-driven society).

According to conservative mouthpieces if you have a color TV and a refrigerator you are not poor, and several of the memes that exist today say that if you have a newer car and a cell phone you are not poor, discounting that you may have purchased that newer car or cell phone before you lost your job and lost your home. That you need to be drug tested before you can receive any kind of benefits. The poor are second-class citizens who cannot be trusted with the meager benefits that are provided to them. They should, “just get a job,” and “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” Great advice; however, if you are making minimum wage, you don’t have bootstraps to pull up.

The same people who refuse to help the poor because they are, “lazy and shiftless,” have no problem giving a tax break, that is larger than what someone making minimum wage earns in a year, to someone who makes their money through investments, in other words, a tax break to someone who has never worked a day in their lives. Only because they have a higher social status they deserve what amounts to a government handout in the form of a tax break, while someone working for minimum wage every single day does not deserve a hand up.

While I am not a religious man I find it hypocritical that the people who claim to follow Christianity do not follow some of its core teachings. When my mom forced me to go to confirmation classes at Bashford United Methodist Church in my youth I primarily went through the motions just to make her happy; however, one quote that Rev. Rick Pearson taught me has stuck with me all these years, “If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth – 1 John 3:17-18.”

This blog originally appeared in Daily Kos Labor on August 19, 2012. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Mark Anderson, a Daily Kos Labor contributor, describes himself as a 44 year-old veteran, lifelong Progressive Democrat, Rabid Packer fan, Single Dad, Part-time Grad Student, and Full-time IS worker. You can learn more about him on his Facebook, “Kodiak54 (Mark Andersen)”

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Looking for answers on the jobs crisis? Look at businesses, not workers.

Posted on August 13, 2012 by Laura Clawson

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Laura Clawson

job_seekers_to_openings_june_2012

The campaign to shift the economic narrative from businesses not creating jobs to workers not being good enough to deserve jobs continues. Sometimes it’s wholly cynical. Other times it seems to be done with good intentions. But ultimately, however good the intentions, workers—whether currently employed or struggling to find jobs—are harmed when powerful people promote the idea that the big reason for unemployment lies in the deficiencies of unemployed people.

Arianna Huffington, for instance, is getting on board with what appears to be a well-intentioned version of this storyline:

More than 20 million Americans are currently unemployed or underemployed, yet 3.4 million available jobs remain unfilled because job seekers lack the necessary skills.

This sentence should, for most readers, refute itself. There are more than 3 million jobs that not one of the more than 20 million unemployed or underemployed people can’t fill because they, the unemployed people, aren’t skilled enough? It’s a common line, and if it’s true, it points to a need for huge government investment in higher education and technical training. But the evidence suggests it’s just not true that skills and training are the real issue here.
For one thing, we have the data showing that recruiting intensity—how hard businesses are actually trying to find people to fill the jobs they claim they want to fill—is very low, far below what it was before the recession.

recruiting_intensity

Other studies, too, find “limited evidence of skills mismatch”; in other words, in a few areas there may be a scarcity of workers already trained to do vacant jobs, but it’s not widespread, certainly not enough so to explain the levels of unemployment we see. That’s pretty clearly visible when you look at a breakdown of jobless people and job openings by industry:

unemployed_and_job_openings_by_industry

Another measure of how workers—currently employed workers—feel about the actual, real-life availability of jobs lies in how many of those workers quit their jobs. Usually you quit one job either because you have another, better job prospect, or because you feel like it won’t be too hard to find an equally good job. But, the Economic Policy Institute’s Elise Gould writes, that’s not the case:

If the economy were healthier, we would expect a larger number of voluntary quits, which would signal that workers are more confident about outside job opportunities. Voluntary quits are also on a general upward climb, having increased 20.7 percent since June 2009. But they too have a long way to go; they are still 26.8 percent below their 2007 average.

Yet despite evidence piling on evidence that high unemployment is because of a lack of available jobs and that if allegedly available jobs go unfilled, it’s only very rarely because of a lack of skilled workers, we still hear a lot about how the problem is that workers need more training.

Many of the people involved in the campaign to highlight “what we the people can do to accelerate job creation and fill job openings” that Arianna Huffington is promoting doubtless have good intentions. And the campaign as she describes it does focus some on job creation, mainly through small business. (That’s a focus that may help some, but again fails to challenge the big businesses that are the real culprits in the jobs crisis.) But as long as the idea that there are millions of for-real job openings that American workers just aren’t good enough to fill is as central a focus as the idea that America needs job creation, this effort will do more to scapegoat workers than to make a dent in unemployment.

This blog originally appeared in Daily Kos Labor on August 12, 2012. Reprinted with permission.

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Want healthy workers who don’t steal? Give them paid sick leave and pay them well.

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Laura Clawson

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Laura Clawson If you needed evidence that it’s better when businesses treat their employees better, here are two pieces: One new study finds that people who have paid sick leave are less likely to be injured on the job and another study finds that convenience store workers steal less when they’re paid better.

In the first study, Center for Disease Control researchers found that workers with paid sick leave were 28 percent less likely to report workplace injuries requiring medical attention, and “Workers in jobs with a high baseline risk for injury—such as construction or manufacturing—appeared to benefit more from having access to paid sick leave.”

The study doesn’t delve into the several ways this could work. Maybe people who have paid sick days are less likely to go to work when illness makes them more likely to fall or be careless. Or maybe there are other factors that come into play, like union membership or occupational safety programs. But that hardly weakens the take-away of the study. If unions bargain for paid sick leave and improved safety standards, making their members both more likely to have paid sick leave and less likely to be injured on the job, then we may better understand the association between sick leave and occupational injuries, but it doesn’t weaken that association. It’s the same if non-union workplaces that have paid sick leave also tend to have solid safety procedures in place, leading to fewer injuries. Whether one is the cause of the other or whether they both are likely to come as a result of responsible employment practices, a concrete benefit for workers—paid sick leave—is associated with another benefit—fewer injuries.

The second study found that convenience stores that pay workers well relative to workers in similar jobs in their region experienced less cash shortage and inventory shrinkage, and that, according to study coauthor Clara Xiaoling Chen, “the effect of relative wages on employee theft is more pronounced when there are multiple workers. Relative wages influence the type of norms that develop among the co-workers.”

Low-paid workers only steal about 39 percent of what paying them more would cost, so many convenience store owners probably think it’s a fair trade. For responsible owners and managers, though, the lower turnover and training costs, as well as the general plus of not having employees who steal, strengthen the financial argument for decent pay. The moral argument for decent pay is always there, of course; it’s just that so many bosses ignore it.

These studies have in common that they both find that better treatment for workers has benefits for the employer and, if we believe that lower rates of injury and theft are good for society, benefits for society as well. It’s unfortunate that the notion that people should be paid enough to live on and be able to stay home when they’re sick needs further validation, but 35 years into the great American race to the bottom, that’s where we are.

(Via Blogwood)

This blog originally appeared in Daily Kos Labor on August 1, 2012. Reprinted with permission.

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Unemployed for even a month? You’re likely to face hiring discrimination

Posted on July 30, 2012 by Laura Clawson

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Laura Clawson If you’re unemployed and searching for a new job, you better hope your last employer went out of business. Otherwise, according to new research, you’re likely to be discriminated against even if you’ve been out of work for as little as a month.

In one study, Ho and his team asked 47 experienced HR professionals to review resumes that were identical except for one detail: Half said the candidate was currently employed, and half said the person had been out of work for a month. The “currently employed” candidate received better marks for competence and hireability. […]
He noted that a third experiment found that job candidates whose previous employer went under received more sympathy. “What does allay people’s bias is some explicit indication that losing your job was not your fault — for example, that the company went bankrupt or suffered some specific setbacks that made layoffs inevitable,” Ho said.

This research just backs up what we already know is happening in real life: widespread discrimination against jobless people at a time when a lot of people are jobless. Staffing agencies even defend their discriminatory practices. Democrats have proposed a bill prohibiting discrimination against unemployed people, but with Republicans in control of the House, such legislation isn’t going anywhere.

This blog originally appeared in Daily Kos Labor on July 30, 2012. Reprinted with permission.

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Your applications go unanswered because ‘job creators’ aren’t really trying to fill job openings

Posted on July 17, 2012 by Laura Clawson

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Laura Clawson The business owner’s version of “the dog ate my homework” these days is “we’re not hiring because we can’t find workers with the skills we need.” Various business lobby groups like the National Federation of Independent Business and the National Association of Manufacturers are pushing that line hard, trying to pin continuing high unemployment on the alleged suckitude of American workers and justify continuing to refer to themselves as job creators even as they create damn few actual jobs. But the facts just don’t support it.

Mike Konczal rounds up research showing that job recruitment intensity on the part of businesses is low. During the recession, businesses didn’t have to try much at all to get a slew of ridiculously overqualified applicants for any job, and they got used to that. Now that things are picking up a little, employers are still spoiled, expecting to be able to snap their fingers and get what they want. And if that’s not the way it works out, they’re content to just sit around waiting and lamenting the lack of qualified applicants, rather than actually making an effort to recruit workers:

What does it mean for recruitment intensity to fall? This recruitment intensity, according to the research, “is shorthand for the other instruments employers use to influence the pace of new hires – e.g., advertising expenditures, screening methods, hiring standards, and the attractiveness of compensation packages. These instruments affect the number and quality of applicants per vacancy, the speed of applicant processing, and the acceptance rate of job offers.” This margin for trying to fill jobs is ignored, or assumed away, in most of the major economic models of unemployment and hiring.

So basically, it’s like this: business puts up a couple halfhearted ads offering $10 an hour and no benefits for a job requiring substantial skill and training, then waits for the applications to pour in. Only now, there are some applications but not thousands of desperate people begging for the job. The business takes its sweet time looking through those applications and getting back to people, some of whom may by now have found equivalently good jobs. Business then complains to reporters that there just aren’t enough qualified applicants for the jobs it’s trying so hard to fill. Reporter dutifully publishes article blaming unemployment on unemployed people.

Meanwhile, people who really do need jobs are left hanging, waiting for interviews, waiting to hear about jobs for which they’ve interviewed, wondering why the jobs that are out there pay so little considering the qualifications required. They’re waiting, struggling, hoping to hear. But the owners of the companies are too busy explaining that their homework was eaten by dogs to actually hire anyone.

This blog originally appeared in Daily Kos Labor on July 17, 2012. Reprinted with permission.

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Taxing Employer Health Benefits: The Poison Pill That Would Kill Health Care Reform

Posted on July 6, 2009July 6, 2009 by Richard Negri

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I was asked today to post a diary to Daily Kos written by my boss, Teamsters General President James P. Hoffa – it is beneath the fold. In this piece we are looking into the fact that a tax hike on health benefits to pay for health care reform is a bitter, bitter pill for middle-class wage-earners to swallow.

By Teamsters General President James P. Hoffa

Congress is finally beginning to grapple with a way to give all U.S. citizens access to affordable health insurance. Unions support universal coverage like a large majority of Americans.

Almost 15 years have gone by since lawmakers considered comprehensive reform to our nation’s health care system with the goal of making sure every American can access health care. How to pay for health care reform was the problem then — and it’s the problem now.

Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), the powerful chairman of the Finance Committee, is suggesting an enormous new tax on employer-sponsored health insurance.

Such a tax would raise hundreds of billions of dollars. That tax revenue would help pay for a public government-sponsored plan for individuals and families.

For those who have employer-provided coverage, creating a “public” plan is a sensible way to make health insurance available to people who can’t get it through their employer and don’t qualify for Medicaid or Medicare. But a tax hike on health benefits to pay for health care reform is a bitter, bitter pill for middle-class wage-earners to swallow.

Most Americans find the prospect of such a tax downright obnoxious. Fortunately, Members of Congress are aware of the public’s hostility to taxing employer-based insurance. A recent national survey by Lake Research Partners shows 80 percent of likely voters oppose taxing health benefits.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) made the mistake of floating the idea during his presidential campaign. Candidate Barack Obama lashed out with a television commercial calling it “the largest middle-class tax increase in history.” Obama’s opposition to taxing employer-based health insurance was a big reason the Teamsters supported him for president.

For all those reasons, it seems extremely unlikely that a tax on employer-sponsored health insurance will ever become a reality. Or, let us hope.

If it did, it would destroy employer-sponsored health insurance.

Adding a tax onto an already crushing expense for employers and employees would create a huge disincentive to buy employer-sponsored health insurance.

It would mostly burden people who are older or sicker, women of childbearing age, employees of small businesses and residents of high-cost communities.

It would set off a stampede to the public plan. And the public plan would lose a major source of revenue.

There is no reason that revenue to pay for health care reform has to come out of the current health care system. Middle-class taxpayers just gave Wall Street the biggest bailout in history. Wall Street can well afford to return the favor.

We know Members of Congress can be creative when they need to find revenue offsets. Let them use that creativity just as they did for Wall Street to prevent another tax on those of us who live on Main Street.

Eliminating subsidies and preferences for the wealthiest Americans would go a long way to pay for the health care reform this country so desperately needs.

President Obama is suggesting a limit on itemized deductions for the 3 million wealthiest people in this country. That would raise about $270 billion over 10 years.

Another good suggestion is to extend the 2.9 percent Medicare tax, which applies only to wages, to ALL adjusted gross income, would raise $38.1 billion.

Imposing a 1.05 percent surtax on the Medicare tax on single people who earn more than $200,000, or couples that earn more than $250,000, would raise $7.2 billion.

Raising the capital gains tax to 28 percent — the rate under President Ronald Reagan — in top income brackets would raise $34.7 billion.

Limiting tax deductions for stock options and the write-off for intangible assets would add $15 billion to the federal Treasury.

Let’s make health care reform cover the uninsured but not penalize hard-working American families and individuals who have employer-sponsored plans. For those who claim this is class warfare, I’d say it’s been going on for quite a while and it’s time for that to change. Middle-class families — the backbone of this country — deserve better.

James P. Hoffa – James P. Hoffa grew up on picket lines and in union meetings. He is the only son of James R. Hoffa, former General President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. On his 18th birthday, Hoffa received his own union card and was sworn in by his father. Prior to becoming Administrative Assistant to Michigan Joint Council 43, Hoffa was a labor lawyer in Detroit for 25 years.

Hoffa is recognized as one of the foremost authorities on Union issues. As the most visible and outspoken critic of government trade policies and anti-worker corporate agendas, Hoffa is recognized as a leader on issues that affect working people.

(bio taken from excerpts of http://www.teamster.org/content/leader-issues-affect-working-people with permission from the author)

This article originally appeared in Daily KOS on June 30th and is reprinted here with permission from the author.

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Workplace Fairness

Tag: Daily KOS

Twelve arrested in protest of Walmart firings and retaliation against activists

McDonald’s Urges Franchises to Open on Christmas Day … Without Overtime Pay

Higher minimum wages have been good for jobs in New England

Workers are worried about having their benefits cut. With good reason.

What is poverty?

Looking for answers on the jobs crisis? Look at businesses, not workers.

Want healthy workers who don’t steal? Give them paid sick leave and pay them well.

Unemployed for even a month? You’re likely to face hiring discrimination

Your applications go unanswered because ‘job creators’ aren’t really trying to fill job openings

Taxing Employer Health Benefits: The Poison Pill That Would Kill Health Care Reform

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