Note: as promised earlier, during the next week or so of light blogging, I’ll be re-posting some stuff that mayu be relevant to current events. This post first appeared in January. January 20, 2005 Wal-Mart Still Sucks Wal-Mart is a union busting, small business killing, community poisoning, government subsidized, sweatshop supplied, job killing peddler of [...]
Workers
BlogWood Redux: Right-to-work… for less money and an early death
July 25, 2005
Note: Continuing my place holding trend of recycling old junk, I am presenting some classic BlogWood posts that may have some relevance to today’s headlines. The following post first appeared on February 8. February 8, 2005 Right-to-work… for less money and an early death Unions have been on my mind lately, for a variety of [...]
Happy 4th
July 4, 2005
The case of Eugene Debs soon came before the Supreme Court. In June of 1918, Debs visited three Socialists who were in prison for opposing the draft, and then spoke, across the street from the jail, to an audience he kept enthralled for two hours. He was one of the country’s great orators, and was [...]
Wexler wanders
May 17, 2005
Democrats are easily winning the Social Security debate simply by standing firm against W’s proposed private accounts and benefit cuts. Although criticized by the opposition for a lack of any alternative plan, the fact is that there is no crisis – doing nothing right now is not going to doom us all, and, in fact, [...]
Why does Jim Davis hate Florida families?
May 13, 2005
Actually, maybe I’m being a little too hard on Jim – maybe it’s his love of big corporations, rather than his hatred of the Florida family, that spurred him to vote for the bankruptcy bill and publicly support DR-CAFTA. The bill would make it much harder for families in distress to write off their debts [...]
CAFTA CAN be stopped
May 12, 2005
Today’s LA Times has more on CAFTA. Trade Pact on Slippery Slope President Bush will pursue his top trade initiative today as he welcomes six Latin American leaders to the White House, but the trade agreement Bush seeks faces serious trouble in Congress and could be defeated by his fellow Republicans. With showdown votes just [...]
Low wage Republicans work to gut minimum wage
March 8, 2005
Backpedaling on minimum wage Last November, voters in Florida passed a constitutional amendment raising the minimum wage by $1, to $6.15 per hour, and indexing it to inflation. Though only 3.1 percent of Florida’s work force makes less than $6.15 per hour and would be directly impacted by raising the floor, Amendment 5 passed with [...]
Get on the phone
March 7, 2005
As the Florida Legislature gears up to make the voter mandated Florida minimum wage law as weak and employer friendly as possible, legislators in Washington are debating the federal minimum wage. Senator Santorum (link may not be safe for work) of Pennsylvania has introduced an amendment in which the 40-hour work week would be abolished [...]
Right-to-work… for less money and an early death
February 8, 2005
Unions have been on my mind lately, for a variety of reasons, and I thought that it was high time to address the right-to-work issue. Right-to-work is part of the Taft-Hartley act of 1947: “In the face of the workers’ determination to resist Wall Street’s attack, Congress nevertheless steamrollered through the savage Taft-Hartley Act…. “Truman’s [...]