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By laura k, on February 22, 2015, at 11:00 am Workers in the US have won a significant victory in their struggle for dignity and a living wage.
This week Walmart announced that within one year, all current Walmart employees will be paid at least $10/hour, and that newly-hired workers will start at $9.00/hour, with a real opportunity to earn $10/hour with six months.
While still far below a basic living wage of $15/hour, the increase does represent a recognizable improvement over the poverty-level $7.25/hour (the US federal minimum wage) that most Walmart workers now earn. And because Walmart is the largest private employer in the country – (Read more…)
By laura k, on December 26, 2014, at 9:00 am Katha Pollitt’s new book, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, is a powerful gust of fresh, clean air that blows away the toxic stench of the current discourse about abortion.
Pro is a thorough, no-holds-barred takedown of the hypocrisy of anti-abortion-rights movement – not only in the most obvious sense that people who claim to be “pro-life” also (usually) support war and the death penalty, oppose gun control, and encourage lethal terrorism against abortion providers and clinic staff, and of people who claim to care about women and children, but oppose all social supports that might improve the lives of actual (Read more…)
By laura k, on November 2, 2014, at 3:30 pm Revolutionary thought of the day: Hunger isn’t about the amount of food around. It’s about being able to afford and control that food. After all, the U.S. has more food than it knows what to do with, and still 50 million people are food insecure.
Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved and The Value of Nothing, quoted by Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything
By laura k, on October 26, 2014, at 2:00 pm Revolutionary thought of the day: …if there is a reason for social movements to exist, it is not to accept dominant values as fixed and unchangeable but to offer other ways to live – to wage, and win, a battle of cultural worldviews. That means laying out a vision of the world that competes directly with the one on harrowing display at the Heartland conference and in so many other parts of our culture, one that resonates with the majority of the people on the planet because it is true: That we are not apart from nature but of it. (Read more…)
By laura k, on September 8, 2014, at 8:00 am Last Thursday, fast-food workers in more than 150 US cities went on strike. Some 500 workers were arrested for civil disobedience, including this man, José Carillo, an 81-year-old McDonald’s worker.
In Detroit, there were so many arrests that the police gave up: they ran out of handcuffs.
There’s a very short video compilation of some highlights from the day here on Facebook. And here’s another good video, this one of the Chicago action, where 51 workers were arrested.
By laura k, on September 4, 2014, at 7:00 am Fast-food workers all over the US are on strike today, demanding a living wage and the right to form a union without retaliation. Did you know that the majority of fast-food workers are adults trying to support families on those crap wages? Their pay is so low, they qualify for food stamps! So taxpayers are subsidizing McDonald’s, as the fast-food industries rakes in billions in profits.
If you’re in the US and you pass a fast-food outlet today, especially a McDonald’s, please stop by to show support for these courageous workers. They are the cutting edge of the labour movement (Read more…)
By laura k, on August 19, 2014, at 8:00 am Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has an excellent essay in Time, something only a big-name writer can get away with in the mainstream media. Abdul-Jabbar names the stark truths behind the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri. And the mere fact that this appears on Time.com is reason for hope. This fist-shaking of everyone’s racial agenda distracts America from the larger issue that the targets of police overreaction are based less on skin color and more on an even worse Ebola-level affliction: being poor. Of course, to many in America, being a person of color is synonymous with being poor, and being poor (Read more…)
By laura k, on May 25, 2014, at 8:55 am I’m quite sure that Canadians who read this blog already know about this, and for others, it’s not relevant. But I want to add my small voice to the chorus of progressive Canadians who are angry, hurt, and disgusted at the Ontario New Democratic Party. Thousands of Ontarians who would normally vote NDP are either voting Liberal, not voting, spoiling their ballot, or considering one of those options in the upcoming provincial election.
If you are not Canadian and you are are interested in our once-progressive politics, you can read the email sent by 34 prominent NDP supporters to ONDP (Read more…)
By laura k, on May 20, 2014, at 8:30 am
By laura k, on February 26, 2014, at 4:30 pm Where oh where has the NDP gone?
One of the most wonderful things about Canada, for me, has always been the presence of a viable third party on the left. When we first moved here, it was so amazing to hear Jack Layton, Libby Davies, Peggy Nash, Paul Dewar, Olivia Chow, Linda Duncan, and many others defend the rights of working people, speak out against war, stand up for democracy, and in general represent the interests of average Canadians. Sometimes I would hear a speech and think, that’s an elected MP speaking! People say things like that in Parliament here!
(Read more…)
By laura k, on December 16, 2013, at 10:00 pm To the Honourable James Moore, Minister of Industry:
In answer to your recent question, yes, it is your job to feed your neighbour’s child. And it’s my job, and it’s my neighbours’ jobs, too. It is all of our jobs to feed every hungry child, because we live in a society, and that’s what society is for. It is appalling that anyone in government would ask such a question.
Mr. Moore, you may have been cornered into an apology by public outcry, and of course you tried the old “I was quoted out of context” route, but we know (Read more…)
By laura k, on December 1, 2013, at 10:00 am From The Nation: Last night, Worker Center Watch – a new website dedicated to attacking labor-affiliated activist groups like OUR Walmart, Restaurant Opportunities Center, and Fast Food Forward - began sponsoring advertisements on Twitter to promote smears against the protests planned for Black Friday. In one video sponsored by the group, activists demanding a living wage and better working conditions for workers are portrayed as lazy “professional protesters” who “haven’t bothered to get jobs themselves.”
“This Black Friday, just buy your gifts, not their lies,” instructs the Worker Center Watch narrator. . . .
Worker Center Watch has no information its website (Read more…)
By laura k, on November 16, 2013, at 1:30 pm If you haven’t read anything by Zadie Smith, I highly recommend finding White Teeth, her debut novel, and diving in. Smith wrote White Teeth while still attending university, and it was published to great acclaim when she was only 25 years old. It’s a wonderfully sprawling novel, by turns wry, satirical, and poignant, crammed full of vibrant characters, multiple themes and threads, and brilliant, surprising language. It deals with the cultural clashes and changes of immigration, generations, and class differences.
If you read White Teeth and didn’t like it, stop right there; you’re not going to like anything else (Read more…)
By laura k, on November 7, 2013, at 7:30 am I found the preceding rtod post buried in Blogger drafts, something Allan saved there years ago. I never got around to posting it, but I never had the heart to delete it, either.
If you’re not familiar with Bill Moyers, he is an American independent journalist, producer, and public intellectual. Earlier in his career, Moyers served as White House Press Secretary under the Johnson administration, but he’s better known for the many shows he has produced and hosted on PBS.
Moyers has always been liberal, but over the past decade, he has become increasingly radicalized as he reacts to (Read more…)
By laura k, on November 7, 2013, at 6:30 am Revolutionary thought of the day: The Gilded Age returned with a vengeance in our time. It slipped in quietly at first, back in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan began a “massive decades-long transfer of national wealth to the rich.” As Roger Hodge makes clear, under Bill Clinton the transfer was even more dramatic, as the top 10 percent captured an ever-growing share of national income. The trend continued under George W. Bush – those huge tax cuts for the rich, remember, which are now about to be extended because both parties have been bought off by the wealthy (Read more…)
By laura k, on October 24, 2013, at 11:00 am I would like to draw your attention to an excellent article by Susan Faludi in The Baffler: Facebook Feminism: Like It or Not.
Faludi contrasts the corporatist, individualistic, me-first, privileged, self-centered, pseudo-feminism of “Lean In” with the collective, cross-class activism of some of the original feminists: the “Mill Girls” of Lowell, Massachusetts, who fought for human rights and labour rights for all women. Describing the links between feminism, class struggle, the labour movement, and even the abolitionist movement, Faludi demonstrates how all oppression is interconnected, and how only collective solutions can affect change. She shows how an effective women’s (Read more…)
By laura k, on September 21, 2013, at 6:00 pm Last night, I heard author, journalist, and activist Chris Hedges speak at the Bloor Street United Church in Toronto, sponsored by the excellent Canadian Dimension.
Hedges is a radical intellectual, in the Chomsky vein, also compassionate and fearless, in the mode of Howard Zinn. He touched on many subjects – and credited the work and thoughts of many others. I can only hope to impart a few snippets of the many threads Hedges wove.
“A seismic moment”
Hedges called the recent US debate on Syria a “seismic moment”. The Obama administration pulled out all the familiar mechanisms used to sell (Read more…)
By laura k, on August 2, 2013, at 8:30 pm This Revolutionary Thought of the Day brought to you by my abiding hero, Clarence Darrow. Darrow dismissed many of the remedial bandages that he and the labor movement had battled for: eight-hour-day laws, women’s suffrage, child labor legislation. “We are busy patching and tinkering, and doing a poor job patching and tinkering at that.”
The working class must seize the earth’s natural resources and the means of production, he said. “There can never be any proper distribution of wealth in the world while a few own the earth – a few men own the mines, the railroads, the forests, (Read more…)
By laura k, on July 24, 2013, at 8:00 pm Part 1: McDonald’s version of company scrip (Part 2 below)
Any minute now we’ll see the return of company scrip.
In the bad old days before labour unions forced reforms, companies – especially in industries where workers were isolated, like mines, lumber, and farming – would pay their workers in scrip. Scrip was a credit that was only accepted at the company’s store – a store that charged wildly inflated prices. What a great deal for the owners, eh? They paid meagre wages, then recovered every penny, while ensuring they retained a steady supply of labourers who were (literally) hungry (Read more…)
By laura k, on June 9, 2013, at 4:00 pm The Casual Vacancy, J. K. Rowling’s first non- Harry Potter book, received almost universally poor reviews, ranging from tepid to savage. Reviewers found the book too long for the subject matter, too slow, poorly paced. They thought the plot was a soap opera. They found the writing cliched, studied, heavy-handed. In a book full of characters, they found few noteworthy. As one reviewer put it: “Unfortunately, the real-life world she has limned in these pages is so willfully banal, so depressingly clichéd that “The Casual Vacancy” is not only disappointing — it’s dull.”
I disagree.
Backlash? Impossibly (Read more…)
By laura k, on April 26, 2013, at 5:00 pm This is the first in a series of reviews of youth (formerly called YA, or young-adult) novels, which I will be reading in no particular order and with no particular method. I love youth literature, and it’s simply a pleasure to read what I want once again, with no schoolwork hanging over my head. As with all my “what i’m reading” posts, if it seems that I like everything I read, it’s because I only write about books I enjoyed.
I finally read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. I’ve been intensely curious about this book since it was released (Read more…)
By laura k, on April 5, 2013, at 12:00 pm My friend Impudent Strumpet writes a series of posts that dispute the oft-repeated notion “money can’t buy happiness”. (Here’s an example.) I find this idea very thought-provoking. I’ve definitely subscribed to the idea that money doesn’t equal happiness – that making the acquisition of riches a primary life goal does not lead to a happy life. Imp Strump’s posts led me to think more clearly about this axiom and see what kinds of truths it might or might not hold.
If money doesn’t buy happiness, try living without any
For people who live in poverty, money undoubtedly could
. . . → Read More: wmtc: can money buy happiness? yes. no. sometimes. maybe.
By laura k, on April 1, 2013, at 7:00 am It’s Opening Day!
It’s always a long, cold winter for a baseball-only fan, but winters for Red Sox fans have been especially long and cold lately. When was the last time we saw a meaningful game? (Don’t answer that.) I lost interest ’round about July last season, unusual for me, but there’s something about losing every night that doesn’t inspire me to plan my life around the team’s schedule.
But that’s all behind us now. Spring is here, and with it, a fresh start, new hope, and who knows, maybe a half-decent, rebuilding kind of season for the Sox.
. . . → Read More: wmtc: what could baseball, sexual abuse, and pitbulls possibly have in common?
By laura k, on March 5, 2013, at 11:00 pm Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, July 28, 1954 – March 5, 2013.From Derrick O’Keefe at Rabble: Hugo Chavez has died — undefeated.
Yes, undefeated. Chavez, no matter how many times the corporate media and the cheerleaders of the status quo call him a dictator, was elected repeatedly with overwhelming majorities.
No matter how many times this slur is moronically or mendaciously repeated, people know the truth. No less than Jimmy Carter certified Venezuela’s elections as amongst the most fair and transparent his organization has ever observed. And the voter turnouts that elected Chavez were usually far, far higher than those
. . . → Read More: wmtc: hugo chavez 1954-2013
By laura k, on January 30, 2013, at 11:00 am An enormous number of library-related stories cross my path, either through school or this blog. A few have stayed on my mind and seem worth fleshing out.
A San Antonio, Texas public library will become the first in the US (and possibly in the world) to go completely bookless – that is, its collection will have no paper books, only digital books.
Much has been written about the pros and cons of digital books, and without recapping all that here, I think it’s important to realize that there are both positives and negatives. The digital book, like all technology, is
. . . → Read More: wmtc: three library issues, part 1: the all-digital library
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