labor

The Life of a Fast-Food Worker

Sasha Abramsky The New Yorker
Across the country, for the past several months, workers have been walking out of McDonalds, K.F.C.s and other fast-food companies, calling for a fifteen-dollar hourly wage. Fast-food companies say that this is unrealistic. Raise the hourly wage to fifteen dollars per hour, they argue, and local franchises, many of them operating with small profit margins, will either fail or have to lay off employees.

Bryan Stevenson: We Need to Talk About Injustice

Human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson shares some hard truths about America's justice system, starting with a massive imbalance along racial lines: a third of Black men have been incarcerated at some point in their lives.
 

In the War on Poverty, a Dogged Adversary

Eduardo Porter New York Times
And yet for all the shortcomings of the government’s strategy, the main reason for America’s persistent poverty is the disappearance of jobs with decent pay that can take workers above the poverty line without the government’s help.

The Republican War on Women: The Newly Invisible and Undeserving Poor

Ruth Rosen Open Democracy
The U.S. Congress is fighting over how much to cut food assistance to needy families. Everyone knows that women and their children are the poorest people in America, but strangely, the faces of women have disappeared from the debate and have been absorbed into abstract “needy families.”

labor

Obama, de Blasio, Fast-Food Workers and the Challenge of Inequality

Gregory N. Heires thenewcrossroads.com
With our inequality coming close to that of Jamaica and Argentina, as Obama pointed out in his Dec. 4 speech on inequality and social mobility, we can no longer ignore the danger it poses to our democracy and living standards.

Friday Nite Videos -- Dec 6, 2013 (Mandela)

Portside
Music has always been a powerful expression and organizing tool of the oppressed people of South Africa. Here is music inspired by and supporting their struggles, including the artists Hugh Masakela, Abdullah Ibrahim, Johnny Clegg and Gil Scott-Heron.
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