Working Life

Shut your damn mouth or be deported. That’s basically the upshot of what happened to Delmer Joel Ramirez Palma, who wanted to tell the truth about the collapse of the under-construction Hard Rock Hotel in New Orleans but, two days after he was hurt in the disaster, Joel found himself dragged off by ICE into […]

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I love the bosses who wring their hands when workers try to unionize, the ones who say, “don’t you love us? Aren’t we good to you”? That isn’t the point. Everyone needs a union so workers together don’t ever have to rely on just good feelings from employers. Which is what I talk about with […]

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Twenty years ago, thousands of environmentalists, union leaders and members, and lots of other progressive forces swept through the streets of Seattle to confront the global corporate beast known as the World Trade Organization, the WTO. They were met by the Seattle police force, buttressed by all sorts of other police and security operations, who […]

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Hypocrisy probably makes it into the top three characteristics, alas, of the vast majority of politicians. That isn’t a reason not to participate in the electoral process but it’s just one of those cautionary, red lights to keep an eye out for. To wit: all those politicians who eloquently talk about the importance of unions—mostly […]

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Deval Patrick has become very, very rich since leaving the post of Massachusetts governor. That’s what happens when you become a managing director of Bain Capital, one of the behemoths in the private equity industry. Patrick became rich working for a company—being a managing director of a company—that has screwed thousands of workers, especially 30,000 […]

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is here…

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Anyone remember that TV advertisement that Merrill Lynch used to have, with the big bull trotting along a beach? I’m reincarnating that bull today for a pretty simple discussion: what is economic progress and how do we have economic growth without destroying the planet? Evelyn Astor, an economic and social policy advisor at the International […]

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IKEA, Volkswagen, Nestle & Airbus are pretty different companies but all of them have a two-faced corporate Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that explains a lot about the oppression workers face in the U.S. South. Across the pond, all those companies have a pretty reasonable posture towards unions and workers trying to unionize. But just […]

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The Gordon Gekko boast in the fictional movie “Wall Street” that “Greed is Good” is really an organizing principle for the financial vultures who rob the country day after day. Today, you will hear two tales of greed and robbery by hedge fund and private equity vultures. First, it’s Paul Singer, the CEO of a […]

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I’m in a politics mood today, having nothing to do with impeachment or the bizarre spectacle of a previous Democratic presidential candidate going seriously off the rails and accusing with no evidence, in McCarthyite fashion, another Democrat of being some sort of asset of Russia…I mean, crazy shit fills up my news dump every day. […]

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