Wages

Solidarity: Demand Reinstatement Of Haitian Union Organizer

May 18, 2016 Staff, www.workersstruggle.org Resist! Haiti, Wages, Workers Rights and Jobs

By Staff of Workers Struggle - Following the day of mobilization on May 11, 2016 that the Textile Factory Union Platform-Batay Ouvriye (PLASIT-BO) launched to demand that the government set the minimum wage at 500 Gourdes ($7.94 for an eight-hour workday) and publish an Executive Order to make it official immediately, Clifford Apaid, owner of the plant, Premium Apparel, made the decision to fire our comrade, Telemarque Pierre, General Coordinator of Apparel and Textile Workers Union (SOTA-BO) and spokesperson for PLASIT, on Saturday May 14, 2016.

Wage Gap Costs U.S. Women $500 Billion A Year, Report Finds

April 12, 2016 Laura Bassett, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! United States, Wages

By Laura Bassett for The Huffington Post - The wage gap between full-time working men and women in the United States short-changes women by nearly $500 billion per year, according to a new report from the National Partnership for Women & Families. To put it in individual terms, if women earned as much as men, each woman with a full-time job would be able to afford an additional seven months of mortgage and utilities, or 1.6 years worth of food, annually.

National Consensus For Transformational Change: Action Needed

April 10, 2016 Robert Weissman, www.huffingtonpost.com Strategize! Banking and Finance, Citizens United, Corporate tax, Democracy, Food and Agriculture, GMOs, Healthcare, Inequality, Social Security, Taxes, Wages

By Robert Weissman for Huffington Post. Americans overwhelmingly agree on a wide range of issues. They want policies to make the economy more fair and hold corporate executives accountable. They want stronger environmental and consumer protections. And they want to fix our political system so that it serves the interest of all, not just Big Money donors. These aren’t close issues for Americans; actually, what’s surprising is the degree of national consensus. The problem isn’t that Americans don’t agree. The problem is that the corporate class doesn’t agree with this agenda, and that class dominates our politics. Because this reality runs so counter to the dominant media story, it’s worth diving into the numbers to get a sense of the vast divide between conventional wisdom and empirical data.

Chicago Airport Workers Join 9-City Strike For Higher Wages And Union

April 4, 2016 Branko Marcetic, www.inthesetimes.com Resist! Chicago, Strikes, Unions, Wages, Workers Rights and Jobs

By Branko Marcetic for In This Times - Barnett says she’s currently relying financially on her daughter, who works. She hopes that with a raise and benefits, such as health care, sick leave and paid time off, her daughter will be able to go back to college and get an undergraduate and and even a graduate degree. Sadaf Subijano, 42, told a similar story. Despite being a security officer who has been at the airport for 20 years, Subijano makes only $12 an hour, a wage she says she would have a “difficult time” on without the financial support of her husband.

Champion Laws Shifting Costs Of Poverty Wages To Corporations

March 7, 2016 Liz Ryan Murray, www.otherwords.org Resist! Corporations, Poverty Wage, Wages

By Liz Ryan Murray for Other Worlds - Imagine if a corporation set up shop in your community and immediately dumped toxic sludge in your local waterways and buried radioactive waste next to your biggest playground. You and your neighbors, I bet, would demand full compensation from that corporation to pay for the clean-up and public health costs. You’d have a strong case. What about corporations that pollute communities not with chemicals, but with poverty wages? The impact can be every bit as toxic, and yet companies that pay low wages get off scot-free. In fact, their CEOs usually get bonuses.

Unions And Coops: How Workers Can Survive And Thrive

February 28, 2016 Brian Van Slyke, www.truthout.org Create! Cooperatives, Unions, Wages, Worker Rights

By Brian Van Slyke for TruthOut. United States - The year 2008 was when the big banks were bailed out, but it was also the year that catalyzed one group of window makers into democratically running their own factory. On the former industrial hub of Goose Island in Chicago, the employees of Republic Windows and Doors made headlines after they were locked out of their jobs just before Christmas without the back pay or severance they were owed. Organized by the United Electrical Workers Union, these displaced workers did exactly what the ownership hoped they wouldn't do. They refused to quietly accept the layoffs. Instead, the workers engaged in a sitdown strike at their factory, garnering local and national media attention. Eventually, the employees won the occupation, forcing Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase (Republic's primary creditors) to create a fund to give the workers their back pay, benefits, and health insurance.

Service Workers Had To Pay To Stay Employed

February 21, 2016 Llowell Williams, www.care2.com Educate! Fight for 15, Labor, Wages, Worker Rights

By Llowell Williams for Care2. On paper, federal law in the United States requires all employers to ensure their employees are paid the minimum wage — $7.25 an hour, as guaranteed by the Fair Labor Standards Act. Service workers are legally supposed to earn this amount, whether via direct wages (the federal tipped minimum wage is $2.13 an hour) or a combination of wages and tips. Simple enough, right? In practice, however, this system is ripe for employee exploitation, as a recent U.S. Department of Labor probe in Michigan shows. The owners of Sophia’s Pancake House, a diner with locations in Kalamazoo and Benton Harbor, Mich., were discovered to have actually required waitstaff to pay $2 per hour from their tips merely to remain employed.

Organizing To Resist Corporatization Of Higher Education

January 25, 2016 Malini Cadambi Daniel, www.newlaborforum.cuny.edu Strategize! Adjunct, Corporatization, Higher Education, Wages, Worker Rights

By Malini Cadambi Daniel for New Labor Forum - The once hallowed and secure work life of American university faculty has for the past quarter century been in turmoil. Being a professor was once a respected, stable profession, but is now increasingly characterized by low pay, minimal benefits, and no job security. An expectation of tenure—the permanent status that was once a hallmark of the profession—is replaced by the reality of contingency, which means that college instructors must reapply to teach courses every year, or even every semester. This new contingency is not a temporary employment arrangement, nor is it confined to a sector of higher education such as community colleges.

Judge Orders Walmart: Rehire 16 Workers It Fired For Striking

January 24, 2016 Dave Jamieson, www.huffingtonpost.com Resist! Our Walmart, Wages, Walmart, Worker Rights

By Dave Jamieson for Huffington Post. Walmart broke the law when it fired 16 workers who went on strike in 2013, a judge ruled on Thursday, January 21st. The judge ordered Walmart to offer the workers their jobs back within two weeks and make them whole for any lost wages. Walmart has the right to appeal the ruling, and a company spokesman told The Huffington Post that the retailer still believes it acted lawfully and will "pursue all of our options." In a lengthy decision, Geoffrey Carter, an administrative law judge for the National Labor Relations Board, ruled that the strikes were protected by law, and that Walmart had no right to discipline workers for taking part in them. Carter also ordered Walmart to expunge any disciplinary infractions against those employees, and to read a notice in the stores where they worked informing employees of their rights under the law.

Ecuador’s Citizens’ Revolution: Retaking Power From Old Elites

January 17, 2016 Staff, www.telesurtv.net Create! Democracy, Ecuador, Education, Equality, Healthcare, Human Rights, Inequality, Media, oligarchy, Rafael Correa, Revolution, Wages

By Staff for Telesur. President Rafael Correa marks nine years in office Jan. 15, 2016, having overseen the transformation of Ecuador. It will be his last full year in power after his recent decision not to stand again. Correa will go down in history as one of the most successful Ecuadorean presidents. Ecuador before Correa was defined by its political and economic instability, with seven presidents forced out of office in a decade. Neoliberal measures applied by previous administrations left the country one of the poorest and least-developed in the region, but the government of Rafael Correa has undertaken a series of deep reforms, which have delivered remarkable changes for Ecuador's long-excluded majority. President Rafael Correa said in 2014, “People must prevail over capital,” adding that politics is about whose interest governments serve: “Elites or the majority? Capital or humankind? The market or society? Policies and programs depend on who holds the balance of power."

A New Era Of Global Protest Begins

January 15, 2016 Rajesh Makwana, www.sharing.org Resist! Austerity, Climate Change, Democracy, Environment, Global Protests, Human Rights, Inequality, Protests, Racism, Students, Wages

By Rajesh Makwana for STWR - It’s reasonable to conclude from a simple analysis of these trends that a revolutionary change is taking place in the global political landscape. As policymaking becomes increasingly subverted by powerful vested interests, the resulting democratic deficit is being filled by concerned citizens who are demanding that governments take heed of their collective demands. This signifies a fundamental shift in the relationship between citizens and the State, and heralds a new expression of democracy that is still in its infancy but already capable of shaping public opinion, influencing policy discussions and even toppling governments.

This Is The Age Of Dissent – Much More To Come

January 15, 2016 David J. Bailey, www.theconversation.com Resist! Austerity, Environment, Housing, Immigration, Protests, Racism, Students, Wages

By David J. Bailey for The Conversation - The year 2011 is widely viewed as the peak of protest and dissent in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the austerity agenda that followed it. It was the year of the Arab Spring, Occupy, UK Uncut, indignados, urban riots and anti-austerity and tuition fee protests – and in which Time magazine famously named “The Protester” as its person of the year. Yet in the UK, protests continue to occur at a rate rarely seen prior to the global economic crisis in 2008. Indeed, 2015 seems to have confirmed the suggestion, made at the beginning of the year, that 2011 was “really only just the beginning”.

Newsletter: Youth Recognize Their Power & Build It

November 15, 2015 Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, www.PopularResistance.org Newsletter Black Lives Matter (BLM), Climate Change, Democracy, Fight for 15, Immigration, Occupy, Paris, Peace, Plutocracy, Racism, Student Activism, Student Debt, Student Protests, Terrorism, Tuition, Wages, Youth

By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers for Popular Resistance. Youth are rising up. They have been showing leadership on multiple fronts of struggle. They see a broken system dysfunctional government that is corrupted by money. It is unable to respond to the crisis of climate change; the reality of systemic racism; students graduating with massive debt in a poor job market and so many other issues. Politicians aren’t the only voices with power. We have power, too. And we have more power when we act together. Young people don’t live single-issue lives. We live at the intersection of the most pressing problems today. Our movements are connected and our purpose is huge. Martin Luther King described the civil rights movement as a time when the “people moved their leaders, not the leaders who moved the people.” If enough of us push together toward a new vision, the world will begin to move. That is a message we should all take to heart. We should continue to exercise our power, continue to fight injustices and as we do so, our power will grow.

Newsletter: 10 Shocking Realities of the TPP; Join The Revolt

November 8, 2015 Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, www.PopularResistance.org Newsletter Climate Change, Courts, Environment, Food Safety, Immigration, Internet, Internet Freedom, TPP, Trade tribunals, Wages, Wealth Ineqaulity

By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers. Finally, the text of the TPP has been released. It is not as bad as we expected – it is worse. Now we see why the US Trade Representative and President Obama wanted to keep the TPP secret for four years after it was ratified. It if had not been for a very aggressive fight against fast track trade authority in which hundreds of thousands of people participated, we would not be seeing the text. One of the compromises they had to make in order to get just enough votes to pass fast track was to agree to release the text publicly for 60 days before Congress officially began to consider ratification. Why did they want to keep it secret? Because they knew that if the people saw the text it had much less chance of becoming law. Here are 10 examples of things they wanted you not to know.

Cafeteria Union Workers Demand Restaurant Employees Get Better Pay

October 31, 2015 Clark Mindock, www.ibtimes.com Resist! D.C., Unions, Wages, Washington, Washington D.C., Worker's Rights

By Clark Mindock of IBTimes - U.S. Senate aides brown-bagged their lunches this week in support of cafeteria workers on Capitol Hill hoping to unionize. The aides were aligning themselves with a broader push by federally contracted workers to unionize and demand higher wages in one of the most expensive cities in the country. Senate cafeteria workers associated with the movement have alleged that the company contracted to provide meals in the underbelly of the Capitol has illegally retaliated against their organizing efforts. The workers are employed by private employer Restaurant Associates, which is contracted to run a subsidized business that feeds senators and their staff.

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