Tim Murphy, at NYMag, “Can Sunday’s Climate March Expand the Movement Beyond Wonky White Men?“: Vernell Robinson was stressed. The 51-year-old resident of the Carleton Manor public housing project in the Rockaways sat last weekend in the putty-colored community room of her building with two other local activists, Danielette Horton and Lawanda Johnson-Gainey, trying to …
Don't Mourn, Organize
Long Read: “Dignity: Fast-food workers and a new form of labor activism””
“Fight for Fifteen” is officially a Serious Topic. In the New Yorker, William Finnegan follows a minimum-wage NYC McDonald’s worker: …. I asked Arisleyda Tapia who she thought could raise her pay. “Bruce,” she said immediately. “He’s rich.” She meant Bruce Colley, the owner of the McDonald’s where she works. Colley owns twenty-nine McDonald’s franchises, …
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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Carry It On
Via commentor Trollhattan, from the Sacramento Bee: McDonald’s, Wendy’s and other fast-food restaurants are expected to be targeted with acts of civil disobedience that could lead to arrests Thursday as labor organizers escalate their campaign to unionize the industry’s workers. Kendall Fells, an organizing director for Fast Food Forward, said workers in a couple of …
Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Carry It OnPost + Comments (51)
Late Night Labor Day Open Thread
While we’re technically still in the Labor-Day window, I want to recommend Ed Kilgore’s Washington Monthly post on “Anti-Labor Day“: I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned here before the profound effect of spending my most formative childhood years in a place that was sort of a monument to capital’s war on labor. LaGrange, Georgia, in the …
Labor Day Monday Morning Open Thread
Another take on the day’s theme, from Timothy Noah at MSNBC: No challenge facing liberalism today is more important — or more difficult — than that of reviving the labor movement. Yet liberals show little enthusiasm for this task. The truth is that liberals and labor leaders bear little regard for one another. Such mutual …
Kentucky Kernels
Front page of the Courier Journal has Mitch McConnell's promises to the Koch brothers in their secret mtg http://t.co/XzDErYDAmg #kysen — Justin Barasky (@JustinBarasky) August 28, 2014 The backstory, as described by Mr. Charles P. Pierce: Charles and David Koch — America’s favorite political porn merchants and the Mitchell Brothers of the Citizens United era …
Time to Bring Back Postal Banking?
Via Matthew Yglesias at Vox: Could the US Postal Service improve its financial position by becoming a bank? And could it change the financial sector for the better in the process? This idea, known as postal banking, has become increasingly main- stream over the course of 2014. And while there’s no indication such a change …