Working Life

They must be popping the corks off the champagne bottles in Bentonville. Wal-Mart makes a ton of money illegally. Once again, the Beast gets to break the law and get away with a slap on the wrist—no jail time for executives and a fine that, by its standards, is puny: it agreed to pay $11 […]

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When you think the Mob is moving in on you, it often is a smart thing to do to just pack up and leave, at least that was true in the old days. Wal-Mart apparently has the same effect. Check out what happens to a local store when the Beast from Bentonville is about to […]

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I’m wondering…is there a budget at the AFL-CIO and is someone watching the bottom line? Cuz the Federation’s audit firm, “Calibre,” had some pretty worrisome information for the Finance Committee, don’t you think? To wit: the Federation’s assets grew pretty nicely between 1995 and today, around 40 percent—but the reserves are down from over $71 […]

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Dear John: Since the AFL-CIO meeting in Vegas, I had a chance to look over your statement of March 2nd. I was thrilled to see you say that the AFL-CIO has a plan to INCREASE the labor movement’s investment in helping workers organize. Actually, you made this point twice in four paragraphs. But, why does […]

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You gotta give the boys in Bentonville their due: they try to figure out every way possible to wriggle off the hook. In the current issue of Business Week (requires subscription), senior writer and long-time labor reporter Aaron Bernstein describes how Wal-Mart lawyers are trying to completely eviscerate the framework of class action lawsuits for […]

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I’m all behind the fight to keep Wall Street’s hands of Social Security but there’s a more silent attack on retirement: the destruction of the private pension system. Though I’ve written about this before, I was reminded of the problem today after reading Mary Williams Walsh’s piece in The New York Times on the government’s […]

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Pension power and China on my mind this morning. On pension, kudos to Bill Patterson and his band of pension-fund activists at the AFL-CIO. They forced Waddell & Reed, a Kansas-based financial services firm, to pull out of the business-funded (ready for an Orwellian-sounding title) Alliance for Worker Retirement Security (AWRS), the coalition pouring millions […]

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I think this one got under the radar screen and wasn’t picked up by the media here or in Canada but the Beast of Bentonville got slapped by the Canadians a few weeks ago. Here’s the press release from Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board: Wal-Mart to pay fines totalling $500,000 for multiple Workplace Safety […]

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Welcome to the age of Remote Control Journalism—that’s what Pete Szekely, who is the chairman of the Reuters unit of the Newspaper Guild, calls the news we’re going to get from sources like Reuters. I ran into Pete yesterday. He reminded me of an important development that’s worth updating: Reuters is moving a number of […]

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A couple of days ago, this message arrived, commenting on my dispatches from Las Vegas. It’s from Greg Junemann, President of the International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers, which has 75,000 members. In his message, his reference to the “five unions” is to the rebel group that has united around a set of principles […]

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