China Labor Watch: labor violations, bogus standards in Wal-Mart’s Chinese supply chain

by Ron Moore

The China-U.S. Economic and Strategic Dialogue in Washington will focus on economic, environmental and security cooperation. The human rights group China Labor Watch is calling on senior officials of both governments to encourage multinational companies to improve labor conditions and promote effective implementation of China’s Labor Contract Law.

CEOs Get One Third Of All Pay

Two news items  highlight how far the nation needs to go in re-balancing the economy toward working people.  First, Think Progress points to a Wall Street Journal analysis that shows more than one-third of all pay in the U.S. now goes to executives and other highly-paid employees.
Highly paid employees received nearly $2.1 trillion of the [...]

Global Electronics Industry Becomes The “New Nike”

by Garrett Brown
Border/Line Health and Safety July 2009
Huge factories of women workers producing consumer products for Europe and the United States under conditions of long hours, low pay, impossibly high production quotas, often unsafe machinery and unhealthy workplace exposures, and sometimes abusive treatment by supervisors and managers.
Unions are banned; wages are docked for infractions of [...]

What to read on China

by Stuart Elliott
With President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner taking part in a major summit with China, it’s a good time to call attention to the excellent article in the latest issue of New Politics.  Au Loong Yu’s “China: End of a Model…Or the Birth of a New One?” [...]

Many Languages, One Voice: Unite Here Local 2 Contract Convention

By Carl Finamore
I parked a few blocks away and was on the lookout for hotel workers to lead my way to UNITE-HERE Local 2’s contract convention being held in San Francisco’s huge George Moscone Center complex on July 23. Since 1986, the union has successfully used these massively attended conventions to mobilize its membership [...]

Obama Administration assaults teachers unions

by Duane Campbell
The federal Department of Education directed by Secretary Arne Duncan has proposed rules for school reform money that would prevent states such as California and New York from receiving funds under the so-called “race to the top,”  a $4.3 billion dollar part of the federal stimulus act.
Secretary Arne Duncan has an enormous fund [...]

Study on Port Trucking Shows Need For New Regulations For Clean Air, Worker Safety, And Economic Stability

As the United States Congress considers the Surface Transportation Authorization Act of 2009, which aims to establish national regulatory reforms for American ground transportation, a newly published study details the widespread failures of port trucking deregulation. Port Trucking Down the Low Road: A Sad Story of Deregulation, published by Demos, a national public policy research [...]

Freedom’s Just Another Word for Standing on Your Throat

by Bob Roman
Chicago DSA
New Ground 125
Over a thousand people gathered outside the Congress Hotel on Monday, June 15, to protest the hotel’s ongoing refusal to negotiate with UNITE HERE Local 1. The workers at the Congress Hotel have been on strike for 6 years now. For the scabs within, the pay and benefits they earn [...]

Single-Payer Lobby Day and Rally – July 30th

July 30 marks Medicare’s 44th Birthday.
Activists from more than a dozen cities are sending busloads to Washington, DC, to celebrate the occasion and to show Congress and President Obama the strong support for a national, single payer healthcare system. People will visit their Congresspersons to urge them to sign on to HR 676 in [...]

Labor Pains at UCLA

by Peter Dreier
Our society is so dominated by corporate culture that we hardly notice it. Every daily newspaper has a “business section,” but not a single paper has a “labor” section. Politicians and pundits talk incessantly about what government should do to promote a healthy “business climate,” but few discuss how to improve the “labor [...]