This week’s reports from The New York Times that found “credible evidence that bribery played a persistent and significant role in Wal-Mart’s rapid growth in Mexico” are breathtaking, says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka in a Huffington Post column. 

Nothing like this has happened since the collapse of Enron and Worldcom in 2002. And Wal-Mart is, of course, a more important company than either Enron or Worldcom. Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in the United States.

Citing our 2012 Executive PayWatch website—CEO Pay and the 99%—the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in an editorial today, says:

Income inequality is spawning deep divisions in America, and this is one problem that starts at the top. 

Members of several unions showed up in force at Whirlpool Corp.’s annual shareholder meeting in Chicago Tuesday. David Jones, a retired member of IUE-CWA, and a former Whirlpool employee of the shuttered refrigerator facility in Evansville, Ind., presented the AFL-CIO’s shareholder proposal asking the company to obtain shareholder approval for any future “golden coffin” payments to senior executives.

What's the reward for hard work, creativity, teamwork and loyalty? The Transport Workers (TWU) say it may be pay cuts and givebacks for you and record bonuses for the CEO.

A new study finds that nearly $700 million a year in state income taxes withheld from workers’ paychecks in 16 states is being used to provide lavish subsidies to corporations, rather than paying for vital public services. Workers likely believe their state taxes are going to fund schools, repair roads or pay for police and fire protection. But not so, says “Paying Taxes to the Boss: How a Growing Number of States Subsidize Companies with the Withholding Taxes of Workers,” a study released today by Good Jobs First.

A new report shows that most of the 30 Fortune 500 companies that paid no federal income tax from 2008 through 2010 were able to keep up their tax dodge two-step in 2011. Those nimble firms include Verizon, GE, Boeing, Wells Fargo, Tenet Health Care and more.

While millions of 99% Americans continue to be jobless and the nation’s unemployment rate hovers around 8.3 percent, chief executive officers of the nation’s largest companies received a 2 percent pay raise last year. While that may not seem like much of an increase, it came on top of a 27 percent hike in 2010, according to a report in USA Today.

The median, or mid-point, pay of top executives was $9.6 million in 2011, USA Today reported, based on 138 companies in the Standard & Poor’s index of 500 largest companies whose pay data has been disclosed. As more CEO pay data becomes public, the AFL-CIO Executive PayWatch website, paywatch.org, will be updated with more complete data in mid-April.

T-Mobile will close seven U.S. call centers with some 3,300 workers, a decision the Communications Workers of America (CWA) says “harms workers and communities.”

On the very day that Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith announced his resignation in revulsion over how the firm is callously “ripping their clients off," Phil Angelides, chair of the nation’s Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, expressed his continuing disgust with how Wall Street has become “a casino floor as big as New York, New York,” after wiping away $9 trillion of household wealth “like a day trade gone bad.”

Speaking at a Responsible Investment Forum of investors, pension fund managers and union and community leaders, convened in Los Angeles by Heartland Capital Strategies, Angelides assailed the financial system centered on Wall Street for “becoming a conduit for speculation rather than productive investment.”

Genwal Resources, the Murray Energy company that operated the Crandall Canyon mine in Utah where six miners were killed in a 2007 wall collapse and three rescuers died in a second implosion, is pleading guilty to violating mine safety laws and will pay a $500,000 fine.