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Labor Takes Historic Stride Forward as Walmart Joins Fair Food Program

Barry Estabrook Civil Eats
The Fair Food Program is unique in that it creates a legal framework linking laborers, tomato farm owners, and final purchasers of tomatoes. The purchasers have agreed to pay an additional penny per pound for the tomatoes they buy. In turn, the producers pass that penny directly along to the workers. A penny-a-pound might sound like a pittance, but it represents a 50 percent raise, the difference between making $50 and $80 a day.

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Advocates for Workers Raise the Ire of Business

Steven Greenhouse NY Times
As America’s labor unions have lost members and clout, new types of worker advocacy groups have sprouted nationwide, and they have started to get on businesses’ nerves — protesting low wages at Capital Grille restaurants and demonstrating outside Austin City Hall in Texas against giving Apple tax breaks. Now, business groups and powerful lobbyists, heavily backed by the restaurant industry, are mounting an aggressive campaign against them.

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Scalia’s Golden Chance to Kill Unions

Josh Eidelson Salon
A Supreme Court case to be heard this month could deal another body blow to the embattled U.S. labor movement. The case, Harris v. Quinn, offers the court’s conservative majority a chance to make so-called right to work the law of the land for millions of public sector workers.

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Low-Wage Movement Strikes Fast Food Processing at Taylor Farms

Brian Tierney Counterpunch
Taylor Farms workers want more than a living wage. They want respect and dignity in the workplace. Instead, they endure unsafe working conditions and the company’s routine termination of workers who are injured on the job - So on a windy Thursday before Christmas, Teamster members in the region joined Taylor Farms workers and community allies in an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) strike against the company.

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In No One We Trust

Joseph E. Stiglitz The New York Times
Rising inequality means rising distrust: A study published last year by the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the upper classes are more likely to engage in what has traditionally been considered unethical behavior. . . Economic inequality, political inequality, and an inequality-promoting legal system all mutually reinforce one another. . . As always, it is the poor and the unconnected who suffer most from this, and who are the most repeatedly deceived.

Tidbits - December 19, 2013

Portside
Reader Comments - Healthcare; Faculty Unions; NATO and the Ukraine; State Surveillance; Venezuela; Nelson Mandela, South Africa and SACP; MSNBC labor dispute; Germany; Voter Fraud in Iowa - 0.00075%; New Books - Rosa Luxemburg; Diners Guide to Ethical Eating; Jobs with Justice; A Letter from Leslie Cagan, Phyllis Bennis, Bill Fletcher & Other UFPJ Founders

Tidbits - December 12, 2013

Portside
Reader Comments - Nelson Mandela; Republic Windows - CEOs Going to Jail; Minimum Wage; Healthcare - Single-Payer; Syria; India homophobia; Austerity; Living Wage - Low wage workers; Books to read (or to give; or both); Announcements - Suggestion for Year-end Giving - Davis-Putter Scholarship; Shostakovich For The Children Of Syria - Carnegie Hall, New York - January 13

Extending Solidarity to the Ecosystem: Laura Flanders Interviews Sean Sweeney

Laura Flanders, Truthout Interview Truthout
What would it mean to extend solidarity to the ecosystem? That's the question at the heart of this conversation with union activist and environmentalist, Sean Sweeney. Even conservatives are saying that 50 years will be more than sufficient to witness the worst impacts of climate change. And if past is prologue, poor and working-class communities will be hit doubly hard. Climate change is a class issue, and yet the trade union movement continues to drag its feet.
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