Walmart Workers Protest over Minimum Wage in 15 US Cities

Karen McVeigh The Guardian
In 15 cities today, Walmart workers and their supporters are staging their biggest day of action since the groundbreaking "Black Friday" strike in November. They are demanding that Walmart reinstate 20 workers they say were fired for taking part in a June strike, and they are calling on Walmart to end its poverty-level wage scale and pay a living wage. (Mike Hall, AFL-CIO Now)

GOP Dreads Prospects of Autoworkers Union Driving South

Erik Schelzig, The Associated Press Seattle Times
Discussions between the United Auto Workers union and a Tennessee Volkswagen plant have raised fears among Southern politicians that union representation would deter businesses - and badly needed jobs - from coming to their respective states.

"Horton" Hears a Stampeding Judicial Amendment

Ann C Hodges and Ellen Dannin, Truthout News Analysis Truthout
The National Labor Relations Act protects the right of employees to join together to improve their working conditions. The collective power of union membership is designed to balance the power of employees with that of employers, who can increase their power by incorporating or forming partnerships. Employees can also be more powerful together by filing class action lawsuits to enforce their rights under employment laws other than the NLRA.

labor

Black Workers, the Public Sector and the Future of Labor Unions

Bill Fletcher, Jr. Law at the Margins
The current crisis facing the public sector, a major location of African American workers, along with the crisis facing organized labor, should present a moment to reconsider old assumptions. A multi-union effort to organize Southern public sector workers could be something close to a game-changer on several levels, not the least being the potential impact on Southern politics and Southern unionization. And, as the saying goes, as goes the South, so goes the USA.

A Decade of Flat Wages

Lawrence Mishel and Heidi Shierholz Economic Policy Institute
The priority has to be jobs now, rather than any deficit reduction. On top of lowering unemployment, policy should also restore the bargaining power of low- and middle-wage workers. This means aggressively increasing the minimum wage; it means reestablishing the right to collective bargaining for higher wages; it means guestworkers should have full rights to the same labor market protections as resident workers; it means paying attention to job quality and wage growth.

Strike: Fast Food Workers Speak Out

These are the names, the faces, the lives and the demands of fast food workers, who are striking for the right to organize and a decent wage.

Food Workers Strike 60 Cities, Largest Food Strike in History Links Civil and Economic Rights

Laura Clawson, Josh Eidelson, Harold Meyerson
The problem over the last thirty or forty years is the declining bargaining power for workers. And the question is, how do we reconstruct bargaining power for workers?" That's what organizers of today's strike are out to do. Workers say they've already achieved some incremental store-specific victories - it's too soon to say if they'll succeed. But they're already drawing near-unparalleled attention from local and national media, and the rest of the labor movement.

Colombia Nationwide Strike Against 'Free Trade,' Privatization, Poverty

Sarah Lazare Common Dreams
Protesters are levying a broad range of concerns about public policies that devastate Colombia's workers, indigenous, and Afro-Colombian communities. The US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement has forced small farmers to compete with subsidized US products, made them more vulnerable to market fluctuations, and eroded their protections and social safety nets through the implementation of neoliberal policies domestically.
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