Corporate Greed
Blog Posts
The Mine Workers (
UMWA
) will appeal a federal judge’s decision today to dismiss
a class-action suit
the union and a group of active and retired miners filed against Peabody Energy and Arch Coal in October. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Charleston, W.Va., charged that the companies had violated federal pension laws when they transferred the health and pension benefits of more than 10,000 active and retired miners to the newly created Patriot Coal Corp. in 2007 to avoid their obligations to the miners.
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In the song, Kanye West refers to a problem that is becoming recognized as one of major importance to America's working families focused on fairness and civil rights—the growth of the private prison industry and the extreme lengths that the corporations that dominate the industry will go to pad their own profit margins, regardless of the effect that it has on families and communities across the nation.
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More workers at Amazon.com’s warehouses—that some describe
as high-speed, high-tension sweatshops
—have filed federal court suits against the company and its contractors that supply the mostly temporary and low-paid workers for workplace rules that require them to undergo unpaid security checks at breaks and the end of their often 12-hour shifts.
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Corporations will no longer be able to hide how much CEOs are paid compared to the workers who make those companies run, under a rule proposed today by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The rule requires companies to disclose the ratio of total compensation between chief executive officers and the median pay of employees.
That new rule does far more than help point out the historic and growing massive gap between CEO and worker pay. It is an important tool for investors to judge a company’s internal compensation structure, says
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka
.
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Earlier this summer,
we reported on a new trend
—especially prevalent in low-wage industries—where more and more workers aren’t getting paper paychecks or direct deposits to their checking accounts, but instead are finding their wages on prepaid cards. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (
CFPB
)
warned employers
yesterday about the misuse of prepaid payroll cards and that they cannot require workers receive their wages via prepaid cards.
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There is no doubt that American manufacturing has suffered a significant decline in the past few decades. This drop in our manufacturing base was a big factor leading to the current economic downturn.
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Today, the Economic Policy Institute (
EPI
) launched an online
wage calculator
that lets people see what their wages should be if based on increases in worker productivity and if most companies didn't fail to adequately compensate workers for those gains. For example, if you are a worker who makes $40,000 a year and you enter that salary into the calculator, it tells you that you should be making $62,529 if your wages had kept up with productivity increases.
Click here to get to the calculator
.
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Yesterday, as fast-food workers participated in the
largest strike the industry has ever seen
, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich released
a new video
and
petition
, along with MoveOn, calling on McDonald's and Walmart to pay their workers a decent wage. In the video, he breaks down what steps are needed to make sure workers get a fair share in the current economy, where jobs are coming back, but most of them are paying less than they were before the recession.
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We're told that corporate executives get paid outrageous sums of money because they add value to the companies they work for. But a new video and
report
from the Institute for Policy Studies (
IPS
) show that this is far from accurate. Of the 500 highest-paid CEOs of the past 20 years, the report shows, 112 of the companies they represent filed for bankruptcy or received bailout money from the federal government, 39 of the CEOs were fired and 39 of those companies had to pay massive fines or settlements for serious fraud—a total of nearly 40% of all the the highest-paid executives.
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Dick Yuengling Jr., who runs the D.G. Yuengling and Son brewery out of Pottsville, Pa., says he
supports a "right to work" for less
law for his home state. He specifically says that such a policy would attract more businesses to the state. He also came out in favor of lowering taxes on businesses.
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