After Katrina: Why Isn’t HUD Building Housing?

Katrina + 10 months

(Video from truthout.com)
An editorial in today’s NYT finally does what, so far as I know, no newspaper has done since Katrina hit New Orleans: connect a few dots in the aftermath.
The Bush administration’s mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina housing crisis has often looked like an attempt to discourage [...]

Wal-Mart Awards Employee Bonuses for the First Time in 20 Years

Put this in the category “Miracle of Miracles”: Wal-Mart is finally, after 20 years, giving its workers a bonus.
Wal-Mart, Georgia’s largest private employer, made its annual bonus for store employees public for the first time in two decades Thursday, saying that about 80 percent of hourly workers will split more than a half-billion dollars.
The company [...]

Sheila Holt-Orsted’s Crusade: Cancer, Racism and the Class War

There are times and places when the lines of culture, politics, science, and social conventions come crashing together, when the attitudes we’ve been ignoring and the problems we’ve refused to address converge to create a snapshot reality of where we are and where we’ve been. Call it Ground Zero-Prime.
In Dickson County, Tennessee, Sheila Holt-Orsted is [...]

TrenchNews, Verse 6

TOP STORY
As bad as the climate is for unions and workers in the US, it can be much worse overseas. At least we don’t have corporations hiring assassins to kill union leaders any more.
Day and night, workers at the port of Quetzal on Guatemala’s Pacific coast load fruit from surrounding plantations and clothing stitched in [...]

Minimum Wage Bill Tied to Iraq Funding (2 Updates)

Nancy Pelosi gets more interesting by the minute. Refusing to sit still for a threatened Republican filibuster of the minimum wage bill because the House cut $$$7Billion in corporate tax breaks out of the Senate version, she has come up with a whole new tactic: she’s tying it to the war appropriations package.
House leaders have [...]

Health Insurance in America

TSA 3: Screeners’ Union Passes in Senate

The Republicans backed off their threat to filibuster the provision of the anti-terrorism bill that would give airport screeners the right to unionize, and on Monday the Senate, too, passed the bill.
The Senate voted Tuesday to give 45,000 airport screeners the same union rights as other public safety officers, despite vigorous opposition by Republicans and [...]

TrenchNews, Verse 5

I apologize for the missing TN but I’ve had to work the past two weekends, which is when I do this because it takes so much time. I’ve gone over the dozens of links I collected in that time, though, and very few of them are outdated – nothing changes very fast on the labor [...]

Card-Check Bill Passes House

To no one’s surprise, the Employee Free Choice Act passed in the House yesterday.
The measure would represent one of the most significant revisions of federal labor law in 60 years. It is the top legislative priority of the labor movement, which represents a record low 12 percent of the workforce, compared with 35 percent in [...]