wages

For the first time in history, the 12 richest individuals in the United States collectively hold over $1 trillion in wealth.

Nomi Prins tracks the acute worsening of inequality since the 2008 financial crisis.   By Nomi Prins TomDispatch.com Like a gilded coating that makes the dullest things glitter, today’s thin veneer of political populism covers a grotesque underbelly of growing inequality…Read more →

The post-Great Recession economic “recovery” was largely reserved for participants in financial markets, not the majority working longer hours and multiple jobs, writes Nomi Prins.  Inequality Worsens Around the Planet By Nomi Prins TomDispatch.com As we head into 2019, a major question…Read more →

What if protesters in Paris win, and the French government gives in to all their demands? What if taxes are reduced, wages increased, President Macron steps down?
I am not talking only about the fuel tax; attempts to impose it have been already abandoned. I am not talking about an increase of the minimum wage – the government already agreed to rise it by 100 euro per month.

The aggravation of the economic crisis is making life unbearable for working people in Venezuela. The destruction of the purchasing power of wages has been combined with the collapse of all basic infrastructure (water, electricity and public transport). Workers in different sectors have started to organize and protest, demanding higher wages; while peasants in the countryside are fighting attempts to destroy Chavez’s agrarian revolution.

UN ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, withdrew the US from the UN Human Rights Council just days before a report was to be presented detailing the threat which poverty poses to human rights in America, and the threat which it poses to America’s democracy. Haley’s withdrawal took place on Tuesday, and UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston’s report came out on Friday.

US president Donald Trump’s ‘beautiful’ trade war with China is going great, if market drops, loss of investment, volatility, and price hikes are how one measures ‘winning’.
After all, Trump said that trade wars are ‘easy to win’ and sometimes necessary.
Now he’s got one, but the figures are returning the sort of results that one would typically associate with ‘winning’ or ‘success’.

WASHINGTON — Weeks after he was sworn in as president, Donald Trump met with Harley-Davidson executives and union representatives at the White House, to win support for his tax-plan proposal:

I think you’re going to even expand — I know your business is now doing very well, and there’s a lot of spirit right now in the country that you weren’t having so much in the last number of months that you have right now.”

Most of the world recognizes May 1—May Day—as International Workers’ Day. Here in one of the few countries that doesn’t, it’s worth pausing to ask how U.S. workers are doing.
At an event last December, Fight for $15 organizer Terrence Wise recalled “going to bed at night, ignoring my own stomach’s rumbling, but having to hear my three little girls’ stomachs rumble. That’s something no parent should have to endure.”
Wise was marking the launch of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.

Once again, President Trump touted the supposed benefits of the new tax law at an April 12 ceremony in the Rose Garden. “Our massive tax cuts are growing paychecks all over our country [and] creating jobs and expanding the American dream just like we said would happen,” he said, in a surprisingly disciplined statement.