Last week, Walmart said it would speed up its plan to hire returning military veterans that it had announced in January. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says Walmart’s latest move “is more about public relations than honoring our heroes.”

We owe it to our returning veterans to make sure they are treated as the heroes they are, rather than as symbols used to ‘greenwash’ Walmart’s eroding brand. After facing enemies abroad, is an $8.81 an hour part-time job the best we can offer returning veterans?

After President Obama called for raising the nation’s minimum wage to $9 an hour and protecting it against inflation, the struggle that millions of low-wage workers face trying to survive on the current $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage is back on the nation’s radar screen.

Recently NBC News took a look at “the workers who answer your customer service calls, deliver your pizzas, take care of your children, bag your groceries and serve your food,” including Crystal Dupont, 25, who takes customer service calls in the Houston apartment she shares with her mother who has disabilities.

If New Hampshire’s lawmakers are “serious about encouraging New Hampshire's economic development, they will consider re-establishing the minimum wage and indexing it to inflation,” writes New Hampshire AFL-CIO President Mark MacKenzie in a column on SeaCoastOnline, a website for several state newspapers. 

In 2011, Republican legislators repealed the state’s minimum wage law. Rep. Carol McGuire (R) went so far as to suggest that there should be no wage floor at all and if an employer wanted to pay $5 an hour that was just fine with her.

How did we end up with all these low-wage, no-benefit temporary jobs in our economy?

Erin Hatton, of State University of New York at Buffalo, had a fascinating read in the New York Times this weekend, The Rise of the Permanent Temp Economy, tracing the rise in America of the temp industry, and how it forged "new cultural consensus about work and workers." 

The wrong way to greet our military veterans as they return to civilian life after defending the nation would be offering an $8.81 an hour part-time job with little to no benefits.

Walmart CEO Bill Simon said this morning at the National Retail Federation conference that starting Memorial Day, Walmart would offer honorably discharged veterans jobs. Simon pledges to hire 100,000 vets over the next five years. Right now, it's unclear if these Walmart jobs would be full-time or offer adequate benefits. 

The jobless rate is dropping and the economy has been adding jobs every month for nearly three years. But far too many of those are low-income jobs that don’t pay enough to meet a family’s basic needs, according to a new report that finds that working poor families in the United States now account for 32% of all working families, up from 28% in 2007, the year the recession began.  

This a guest post from Saru Jayaraman,  director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-founder and co-director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, and Joann Lo, executive director of the Food Chain Workers Alliance.

Big Food companies and their lobbying groups have lied to us many times. They convinced Congress to include tomato paste on pizzas as a vegetable. They say we need industrial, chemical-laden agriculture to feed the world (check out Anna Lappé’s new video Food MythBusters to learn that we don’t). And Big Food has also spread the mythology that if the minimum wage is raised, food will become so expensive that none of us will be able to afford to eat out—or eat at all—again.

Something as simple as a pair of “Cars” sneakers can make a huge difference in a family’s budget.  UAW Local 685 in Kokomo, Ind., handed out school supplies and shoes to more than 200 children Tuesday at its headquarters during the annual UAW giveaway, the Kokomo Tribune reported.

We reported this week the federal minimum wage hasn't increased in three years. If the minimum wage increased with inflation, it would be $10.55, not $7.25 as it is today. In no state can a minimum wage employee working a 40-hour week afford a two-bedroom apartment. This is why the AFL-CIO is urging Congress to pass the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2012. 

Today marks the third year minimum wage workers haven't seen a raise. While the price of just about everything else has skyrocketed (milk, eggs, health care, college), full-time minimum wage workers are barely making more than $15,000 a year. Here are 10 facts you need to know about the minimum wage.