Labor

May Day (tomorrow) sums up our history. No longer is it May Day (Year 124) (although it is in Richmond VA, and they beat back the requirement that they hire mercenary guards in order to hold events). This is Mission Accomplished Day Year 7 and Downing Street Minutes Day Year 5 and Impeachment Is Off the Table Day Year 4. How’s that letting Bush and Cheney’s crimes become standard practice working out for you? Yeah, me too.

By David Swanson

War makers, torturers, warrantless spyers, and all sorts of other categories of criminals are still off the hook.  But there is a bit of "looking backward" going on.  Two out of the three people whom we at StopTheChamber.com have asked for criminal investigations of are now under investigation.  We’re wondering about the third, the big one, the one that ties the other two and so much more together.

On April 12th, we asked read more

By David Swanson

Walking through Charlottesville, Va., today I saw a sight that is increasingly common in the United States: men in prison uniforms, watched by guards, out working in public, in this case shoveling snow. I asked them if they were being paid for their work, and they just laughed.

A short while later I ran into a city official who was clearly familiar with the prisoner snow-shoveling program. He told me it was nothing new, part of “work release,” gave the prisoners a read more

By David Swanson

“If a majority of workers want a union, they should get a union. It’s that simple. We need to stand up to the business lobby and pass the Employee Free Choice Act. That’s why I’ve been fighting for it in the Senate and that’s why I’ll make it the law of the land when I’m president of the United States.” –Barack Obama

Nobody is making it the law of the land. Nobody is fighting for it. The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) has read more

Washington, DC: On Thursday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce sent a letter (http://tr.im/CQCf) to an internet provider threatening legal action if it did not shut down the Yes Men parody website, (http://tr.im/CQCu) because the website falsely portrays the Chamber’s position on global warming. However, in its letter, the Chamber falsely inflated its membership by 1,000 percent read more

By David Swanson

The US Chamber of Commerce blew a mere $39 million on lobbying in Washington in the past three months. Lobbying for the promotion of global warming, the denial of healthcare, the further deregulation (if possible) of the financial “industry”, blockage of the right to unionize, the lowering and elimination of minimum wage laws, maintenance of tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas, and protection of the “right” of corporations to bribe politicians. Money read more

The Fight for Higher Minimum Wage
CNN Financial: CNN Money Morning
April 3, 2002
Guest: David Swanson
Host: David Haffenreffer

DAVID HAFFENREFFER, CNNfn ANCHOR, MONEY MORNING: Most Americans would agree that the national minimum wage of $5.15 an hour isn’t really a living wage. But more individual cities and counties are joining a living wage movement. And joining us now with more on all this is David Swanson . He is with an advocacy group for lower income Americans known as ACORN. Welcome read more

By David Swanson

Ohio may be trailing Michigan and a few other states in official unemployment statistics, but in all of these states the truth is worse than we’re told, and it’s visible. Unemployment rates do not include those who’ve given up looking for work, those with an insufficient part-time job, those who have figured out that they would pay more for childcare than they would earn working, those in prison, or those working for less than a living wage.

On a book tour in read more

By David Swanson

Cultures isolated from modernity have tended not to engage in anything resembling what we call work. When we began inventing modern time-saving devices and increasing productivity in our factories (and, yes, exploiting other peoples to do the factory work) we were always told we’d be able to work less — often by people who clearly imagined there were limits to human greed and cruelty.

We live in a culture now where any talk of not wanting to work is immediately understood read more

By David Swanson

According to news reports, president elect Obama is considering for Labor Secretary three people who actually know something about labor and actually support the intended mission of the labor department, which is protecting the rights of laborers. And by laborers, I mean you. If you have not recently received a government bailout, you’re one of us. Here’s the short list:

•Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of House Education and Labor Committee
•Former read more

By David Swanson

Imagine being so angry that you couldn’t find a job that you were able to decide, as a man in Tennessee just did, that the way to solve your problems was to attack liberals – the people who support (albeit ineffectively) workers’ rights, union rights, and fair trade, who oppose NAFTA, oppose tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas, support investing in job creation at home rather than wars abroad, and want to tax corporations and the super-rich rather than small read more