No state has a longer, more profit-driven history of contracting prisoners out to private companies than Alabama. With a labor system that dates back more than 150 years, it has constructed a template for the commercialization of mass incarceration.
The expansion of McDonald’s in the twentieth century brought the fast food chain to more than 100 countries. But how well did it integrate into its new home(s)?
So unions clearly empower African Americans — yet Walmart, Amazon, and McDonald’s are unabashed union-busters.
OSHA rolled back its previous announcement that it would functionally leave federal safety regulations unenforced by refraining from government investigation of corona-related health and safety complaints.
It's About More Than Fighting Abuse—It’s About Workplace Democracy
The NLRB Just Dealt a Major Blow to the Fight for $15. Now’s the Time to Take Stock of the Campaign.
Poor wages, precarious jobs, absence of benefits, no social security and denial of union rights are the patterns of the global fast food industry which relies on the labor of millions of workers employed by a few giant coporations operating under the names of different brands.
Of course it’s the same struggle: “It’s the same people,” says Saru Jayaraman, the director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. “Young people working in fast food are the same people as those who are the victims of police brutality. So the Walmart folks are talking about #blacklivesmatter and the #blacklivesmatter folks are talking about taking on capital.”
Thousands of fast food workers across 150 U.S. cities walked off the job on Thursday. Hundreds of those workers — nearly 500 of them, according to a public relations firm supporting the strikes — willfully committed civil disobedience as part of their protest, and were subsequently arrested by the police.
By calling McDonald’s a “joint employer” with its franchisees, the General Counsel—that’s the prosecuting side of the NLRB—sided with workers, who argue the corporation exerts so much control over store operations that it should be held accountable for what happens under its Golden Arches. The General Counsel’s announcement will clear the way for local NLRB offices to hold the corporation, not just franchisees, accountable for the workplace abuses.
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