North Carolina raised the minimum wage to $15/hour for around 10,000 state government and public university employees. Legislative budget-writers explained that this raise will help retain experienced state workers, who often leave their jobs for higher-payin... More »
Incarcerated people across the United States will go on strike starting tomorrow (Tuesday, August 21st) to protest mass incarceration, poor prison conditions, and exploitative prison labor practices. While the 13th Amendment bars slavery and involuntary servi... More »
In today’s Sunday Review for The New York Times, economic historian Louis Hyman argues that new technology companies like Uber and TaskRabbit did not create the gig economy but only took advantage of a decades-long shift to temporary work arrangements. He ana... More »
In the forthcoming September issue of Vanity Fair, Uber engineer-turned-Silicon Valley watchdog Susan Fowler examines the future of the gig economy. In her piece entitled, “What Have We Done?: Silicon Valley Engineers Fear They’ve Created a Monster... More »
Yesterday Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced the Accountable Capitalism Act, a plan to reduce income inequality while still operating within a capitalist framework. The goal is to make large companies responsive not only to their shareholders, but also to th... More »
Gig-economy-giants like Uber, Lyft, and Instacart are quietly lobbying California Democrats to reverse a groundbreaking court ruling protecting gig workers’ rights. In the LA Times, law professor Veena Dubal explains the stakes. In Dynamex, the California Supr... More »
President Trump acknowledged on Twitter on Monday that the White House required staff to sign nondisclosure agreements, which his aides have declined to confirm for months. Although legal experts say such agreements are essentially unenforceable for government... More »
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid in Nebraska arrested 133 workers in one operation, the Washington Post reports. The workers were taken at 8:45 a.m. in the small 3,700-person town of O’Niell, Nebraska. The superintendent of the town’s public... More »
U.S. workers’ real wages fell last year, the Labor Department reported Friday, as scant wage gains were wiped out by inflation. Between July 2017 and July 2018, average hourly pay increased 2.7% — but with cost of living increasing by 2.9% in the same period, ... More »
California is using prison labor — including 58 incarcerated youth — to battle record-breaking forest fires raging across the state this week. As of 2015, more than more than 30 percent of California’s firefighters were incarcerated workers. Incarcerated firef... More »
As expected, the New York City Council voted yesterday to cap the number of Ubers allowed to drive within the city, in a win for taxi drivers, who had complained of deflated incomes. The move came despite opposition from the NAACP and other civil rights organi... More »
In a hard-fought win for organized labor, Missouri voters repealed a so-called “right-to-work” law enacted last year by Missouri’s Republican state legislature and former Republican governor by a nearly 2-to-1 margin. The New York Times repor... More »