Dollar stores have expanded across the country and complaints about work conditions and safety have grown with them. Over the past year, workers have been organizing, protesting and striking for better workplaces
Health care workers are crucial to our society, yet we reward them with low wages and dangerous conditions.
When we stereotype or lazily assume low-wage workers to be “low skill,” it reinforces an often unspoken and pernicious view that they lack intelligence and ambition, maybe even the potential to master “higher-order” skilled work.
Much attention has been given in recent years to low-wage work in the fast-food industry, big-box retail, and other service sector industries in the U.S. The rise of low-wage business models in the service sector has often been contrasted to business models of the past, when blue collar jobs in the manufacturing industry supported a large middle class in the U.S. Recent research found that manufacturing production wages now rank in the bottom half of all jobs in the U.S.
Just as in the 1850s (with the Dred Scott decision and the Fugitive Slave Act), the Southern labor system (with low pay and no unions) is wending its way north.
Fast food workers continue their fight for higher wages and the right to unionize. Over 1,300 workers gathered this past weekend in Illinois, and voted to ramp up their tactics.
With Washington tied up on other issues, states and municipalities are handling minimum-wage increases on their own. Legislators and voters in five states — California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Rhode Island — and in four local governments this year approved measures raising the minimum wage above the current national rate of $7.25 an hour, in one case as high as $15 an hour.
Florida Congressman questions Obama's praise for Wal-Mart: "What has Wal-Mart given the president in return?" "Even people who are employed now, many of them are not making enough money to survive," said Grayson. "And the outlet more and more for people that they see is this kind of civil disobedience, because the political system has become completely unresponsive to their genuine concerns and their physical needs."
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