Labor

By David Swanson

John Bowe’s terrific new book called “Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy” takes the reader on a journey ending in the question I’ve placed above this essay.

Bowe makes three major stops along the way. The first is in Florida, where we learn in depth about the lives of immigrant farm workers held against their will and paid little or nothing for their work. By almost anyone’s definition, this is a story read more

By David Swanson

Live Blogging Progressive Caucus Hearing on Economy

January 16, 2008 – I’m in the Cannon House Office Building Caucus Room, and it’s much fuller than it has been in the past for some recent Congressional Progressive Caucus events. That’s encouraging. But the few Congress Members who were here at the start of the event have left to go vote. Other than the Caucus Co-Chairs Lynn Woolsey and Barbara Lee, who offered opening remarks, I only noticed Sheila Jackson read more

By David Swanson

April 22, 2006 — The first sentence of the top article in the only daily newspaper in Charlottesville, Virginia, today contains a remarkable analysis of the living wage movement: “The president of the University of Virginia on Friday acknowledged that students fighting for better pay for university workers have a valid case for change, calling the debate “revolutionary” in its shifting of the poverty burden from government to the private sector.”
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By David Swanson

Presidents and Prime Ministers who most deserve to be ridden out of office on a rail: George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and John Casteen.

John Who?

John Casteen is the President of the University of Virginia. For years now, he’s been sitting on over a billion dollars while paying employees poverty wages. This past weekend he had 17 students arrested and hauled off to jail for sitting in to protest this injustice and to demand a living wage for workers at the University.

Rather read more

By David Swanson

“It would take half our salary to buy one of the sweat shirts we produce,” Josefina Hernandez Ponce told students at the University of Virginia on Wednesday night. The classroom was packed to capacity with students in every seat and squeezed in on the floor.

A flyer passed around showed where the $39.99 paid for a UVA sweatshirt goes ($2.40 in royalties to the university, $0.20 in pay to the workers who made it).

But that familiar story wasn’t all that Hernandez read more