Corporations
Low-Wage Workers Routinely Cheated
Published September 02, 2009 @ 12:46PM PT
A powerhouse of scholars has just released a comprehensive report documenting systemic, "widespread" wage violations in the low-wage market. 68% of more than 4,000 low-wage workers surveyed (average wage was $8.02/hour) had experienced at least one wage violation in the week prior. Wage violations included: not receiving overtime pay, not being given any breaks, having deductions illegally taken from paychecks, being forced to work past their scheduled finishing time, having their tips inappropriately garnished, and being paid less than the legal minimum wage. Critical to keep in mind as you advocate for workers' rights: the overall quality of the the workplace correlates strongly to the likelihood of wage violations.
Keep Poverty on the Agenda
Published August 30, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
With the death of Sen. Kennedy and the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina both happening this week, the topic of poverty was fresh in the public's mind. In eulogizing Kennedy, most of us could take pride in remembering his service to "working people" everywhere, his commitment to poverty reduction over the life of his career. With Katrina, it is also about a job unfinished, but with a much less nostalgic, sweet glow - the enduring problems of blight, housing insecurity, racial inequality and poverty are glaring, graphic, and depressing.
Whether you're motivated to action by the inspiring good works of folks like Senator Kennedy, or fueled by a sense of outrage over injustice, this past week offered plenty of reminders that poverty is a persistent, entrenched, political problem for which solutions exist. Investments in early childhood education pay lifetime dividends. Economic boycotts and union movements highlight workers' rights and benefits. Providing childcare, fair pay, and extensive family leave policies give mothers better opportunities to compete economically and earn enough to care for their families. And universal health care bankrupts neither households nor the entire medical system.
Change.org is just one platform where you can commit (and re-commit) to fighting poverty in the U.S. To start, let's begin by keeping poverty on the public agenda - as a problem we can and must solve. Let's not let it slip away as our weekend tributes wrap up. As Uncle Teddy and 15k volunteers in New Orleans remind us, the cause endures and the work goes on.
("Not Everyone in SF is Rich..." by Son of Groucho)
25% NOLA Public Housing Residents Lost
Published August 25, 2009 @ 08:53AM PT
Saturday August 29 marks the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's destruction of the US Gulf Coast. The pre-storm problem of deep poverty and racial inequality has worsened, and gone largely unreported. Those of us at Change.org have an opportunity to reverse that trend. It begins by educating ourselves on the enduring struggles down there to provide a safe, affordable place to live for all those who lost their homes due to a lethal combination of a natural disaster and wrongheaded public policy. To start: HUD cannot locate over 25% of public housing residents who were living in the now-demolished "Big Four" projects prior to the storm.
More, including what you can do, after the jump.
Boycotting Whole Foods
Published August 18, 2009 @ 04:28AM PT
If you're like me, you've been watching steam gather behind the boycott of Whole Foods (WFM) over CEO John Mackey's anti-healthcare reform op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. The New York Times has a handy round-up of the various rationales behind the boycott - I'm partial to Matt Yglesias's point that it challenges the outsized "social and political power" of CEOs in this country. I'm also delighted to see Mackey's customers - typically affluent, politically liberal - push back on Mackey's political ideology. WFM, from most accounts, provides generous healthcare and is a comparatively good retail/service job - so this isn't a boycott about workers' rights in the traditional sense. Instead, it's a pointed rebuke of the idea that we lack the right to healthcare.
Highest Income Inequality Ever
Published August 16, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
We've surpassed even the vaunted inequality of the 1920s - the "Gilded Age" years that preceded the Great Depression. In 2007, the top 10% of American workers took home just under 50% of all wages. Think about that: if 10 workers were to split $100, one guy (no doubt) would get $49.70, and the remaining 9 would split $51.30. What do you think that one man does for a living compared to the other nine? What jobs, to your mind, possibly deserve that kind of distorted payout?
The paper, written by a Berkeley professor, shows how from 1993 through 2007, the top 1% of earners captured "half of the overall economic growth." Think about how hard you've been working at your job for the past two decades - now you know where your hard-earned profits have gone! And the trend continues - the just released Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows American workers are working longer hours for less pay. Make sure you click through the link to see that thanks to all this productivity, corporate profits are up.
And the cycle continues.
Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly thinks if Democrats or progressives try to rectify this inequality they will be charged with fomenting "class warfare." David Sirota sees the wrangling over Social Security and concludes we're all ready there. We've asked a few times here: is it time to protest yet?
Prison the New Public Housing
Published August 10, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
Affordable housing advocates, esp. pro-public housing folks like myself, spend a lot of time comparing the various subsidized housing options out there: public housing, Section 8 vouchers for renting in the private market, tax-credit funded housing built by non-profit developers. Turns out, we've been miscalculating by half the 4-6M or so units these different options provide, because we've been leaving out a major new source of publicly subsidized housing for the poor: Prison!
Yep, according to Ehrenreich's latest missive in the NYT (see our previous coverage of her series here and here), "the same number of Americans — 2.3 million — reside in prison as in public housing."
Ehrenreich wonders if the collision of rising extreme poverty and excess criminalization and incarceration policies will lead us to descalate both - resorting instead to humane treatment of the poor and a move away from criminalizing low-income people as, she fears, disgustedly, a revenue source in this extreme recession. I'd add the masses find it morally uplifting to torment the poor during tough economic times, as it reassures us with a strong "us" vs. "them" dichotomy and gives us a sense of control of the more chaotic zones of life, given we can't seem to stop the corporate pillaging going on above us.
I too wonder if sheer economic necessity will work in our favor differently, by leading to de-crowding of prisons and cessation of expensive housing demolition and development programs. Of course, our desire to clamp down on "concentrated poverty" and its alleged ills bodes differently for prisons versus public housing. Dispersal strategies suddenly seem a lot more worrisome when we're casting offenders into the winds.
Most importantly, reversing these punitive, cruel, expensive cycles really requires to see the poor as human beings like us, our brethren, locked in a similar struggle for economic stability and justice. It requires a framework that focuses less on poverty alleviation and more on poverty eradication. It requires a common framework that embraces all of us. Gee, I wonder what that could be...
(Photo of Fremantle Prison, a decommissioned prison in Australia, by amandabhslater)
Is it Time to Protest Yet?
Published August 03, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
More on those unemployment #s: Corrente takes a look at the National Employment Law Project report on unemployment - 1.5M Americans will have exhausted their unemployment benefits by 12/31/09 - and wonders if this is what will finally "break" us. And by break I mean rise up and fight back against atrocious wealth inequality.
I'm skeptical. Almost one-third of unemployed workers haven't worked in six months. That's a long time to be home all day, surfing the internet, sending out resumes, playing with your kids, letting yourself go, feeling your self-confidence and sense of self-worth along with your "soft skills" just totally atrophy. And from this sense of desperation we're going to fight for our economic rights? Revolution doesn't come from desperation; it comes from a sense of entitlement that we deserve more. We have to recognize our own oppression before we can revolt against it. This idea that work = self-worth means that out-of-work Americans just aren't our go-to revolutionaries. We're nothing without our jobs, and we get nothing from our society without them. And we buy into this set-up.
We're coming on 6 months since we last had this conversation about worker protest. As 500,000 Americans gear up to lose their unemployment benefits next month, seems like now's the time to have this discussion again.
What's it going to take, people??
(Photo of strike threat by janitorial workers in Santa Monica by Steve Lyons)
