The start to this weekend’s Fight for $15 convention didn’t go as planned. As roughly 10,000 conference goers gathered in Richmond, Va., to talk about unions and low-wage work, organizers behind the nationwide campaign demanded a union of their own. On Friday, Jodi Lynn Fennell, a child care worker organizer from Las Vegas, attempted to …
BREAKING—Fight for $15 Organizers Tell SEIU: We Need $15 and a Union Read More »
Are you an employee? It seems like a simple question that must have a simple answer for most people. But definitions in different laws and rulings enforcing the laws vary. And that variation provides an opening for a growing number of employers to cheat governments of taxes and workers of income, benefits and protections by …
While most liberals were celebrating the Supreme Court’s June rulings affirming both marriage equality and Obamacare, many labor leaders were already worrying about next year. They feared that the court might hear a case that many of them saw as potentially delivering a crippling blow to the union movement: Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association. And …
Calm Down: SCOTUS’s ‘Friedrichs’ Case Won’t Mean the End of the American Labor Movement Read More »
President Obama’s administration took another promised step on Tuesday towards raising the living standards of American workers, and Republicans and business groups are not likely to be able to stop it. Using the administration’s power to update workplace rules regarding premium pay for overtime work, the Department of Labor on Tuesday began taking steps that …
Fast food workers and their allies in New York City, supported by protestors elsewhere around the country, flooded public hearings in New York today with the message that they deserve at least $15 an hour. They testified before a wage board appointed at the behest of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to determine standards …
The List of the Fight for $15’s Victories—Tangible and Intangible—Is Getting Longer Read More »
As undergraduate students at Harvard, Devi Lockwood and Jia Hui Lee would typically have little reason to know Rosa de la Rosa or Heather Nichols, who work just a few miles from Harvard Yard cleaning guest rooms and staffing the front desk, respectively, at Le Meridien Hotel. But Lockwood and Lee, overcoming the classic town-gown …
Harvard Students, HEI Hotel Workers Score Mutual Victory Read More »
CHICAGO—Even more than frustrated airline passengers who find the skies increasingly unfriendly, airline and airport workers—who only walk the airport terminals’ long corridors—are discovering that the air travel business is growing less and less congenial for them. In reaction, workers at Chicago’s O’Hare and Midway airports—the nation’s second and twenty-seventh busiest—are trying to defend and improve the quality of their worklives …
Chicago Airport Workers Seek Fairness, Unionization Read More »
UNITE HERE gets personal with Penny Pritzker, chief Obama campaign fundraiser CHICAGO—Thursday, March 2, was the deadline for homeowners in Chicago and the rest of the surrounding county to pay the first installment of their property taxes. It is rarely a cause for celebration, even for those, like Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who see taxes as the …
Hotel Workers Challenge Morality of Hyatt Owners: The Billionaire Pritzkers Read More »
The headline news on Friday that the unemployment rate in November dropped 0.4 percent to 8.6 percent may help President Obama avoid losing his job next year. But the reality behind the figures will not—and that reality includes a big dose of stress, anger, despair and insecurity even beyond the ranks of the unemployed, according …
Jobless Rate Drops, But Pain, Despair Persist in Weak Economy Read More »
Finally, anger at the abuses of the rich against the other 99 percent of Americans is bubbling up, giving energy to the Occupy Wall Street protests and their progeny around the country and fueling other actions. And just as unions are throwing their support behind those demonstrations, they hope the populist upsurge on the left …
Trumka: AFL-CIO Will Support Occupy Wall St. Protest “In Every Way’ it Can Read More »
Madeline Messa is a 3L at Syracuse University College of Law. She graduated from Penn State with a degree in journalism. With her legal research and writing for Workplace Fairness, she strives to equip people with the information they need to be their own best advocate.
