Working Life

Just in time for Christmas, a jury handed out a gift to the Walton family: it has to pay up for breaking the law. Again. Jury slaps Wal-Mart with $172M rulingA California jury orders the retail giant to pay $172 million to workers denied lunch breaks. (CNN) – Jurors in Oakland, Calif., Thursday awarded $172 […]

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The news is this: the union leadership has agreed to recommend to its executive board that the members go back to work, possibly by late afternoon or tonight, while mediation continues. There are concerns, though. From what I could tease out from the mediator’s comments, the MTA has not taken the issue of the pension […]

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10:55 a.m. Folks, I just got a call from an extremely knowledgable source who says there may have been a deal reached in the transit strike. I know nothing more than that. And it’s not clear what the terms will be. More later.

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Yesterday, I was out and about in the city trying to lend support to the strike. Sure, it was inconvenient, as I’ve heard many New Yorkers say, to get around. But, the strike is about a lot more than inconvenience. I want to start by repeating some thoughts expressed by Roger Toussaint, the leader of […]

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So, now we know, thanks to Steve Greenhouse’s analytical story about the fight over the pension issue, that the entire savings to the MTA–an authority that has a surplus of at least $1 billion–if it got its pension demand (which both sides agree triggereed the strike) would be a whopping $20 million over the next […]

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Roger Toussaint, president of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, appeared before the microphones at the union hall last night almost three hours after the strike deadline of midnight (which means that all the newspapers are out of date today in terms of info–you’re best bet is to go to New York 1). In […]

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A lot of attention has been paid to the impending strike of the transit workers here in NYC (and we will see what happens today as the new strike deadline approaches at midnight tonight). But, in the meantime, I’m going to make a holiday pitch for some other strikers. Graduate students at New York University […]

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That might be a good title for a B-movie…but it’s actually the title of a column today by Ben Stein in The New York Times Sunday Business section. For my tastes, Stein is often a bit too much of a cheerleader for the free market. But, in this column, he joins in the chorus we […]

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[First a note–for those of you, like me, who thought you were experiencing Groundhog Day (seeing only post up to December 10th), no, it was just that the blog service had either crashed for a day or shut down without warning. I wasn’t loafing Friday but simply could not post]. I’ve often written here about […]

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The transit workers are still locked in negotiations with the Wal-Mart-like Metropolitan Transit Authority (like Wal-Mart, the MTA is bulging in surpluse but doesn’t think the workers should get a fari shake) and I don’t have any idea insight so…I came across some new information on the campaign to organize FedEx parcel delivery workers. The […]

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