Teamsters
Southern California port truck drivers loading up on wage-theft cases Los Angeles Times ...the state Department of Industrial Relations has ruled in recent months that nearly 40 drivers were improperly designated as contractors, which denied them significant workplace protections. So far, $4.3 million in back pay and penalties has been awarded to drivers...
Trade
Trans-Pacific Partnership talks going on in Ottawa CBC News ...Trade officials from Canada and other Asia-Pacific nations are meeting behind closed doors in Ottawa to discuss the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive free-trade proposal that could create one of the world's largest trading blocks...
War on Workers
Rupture-Prone Oil Trains Keep Rolling After Quebec Crash Bloomberg ...two-thirds of the tank cars in use today are still older models that safety experts say are vulnerable to puncture. The July 6 derailment last year in Quebec and seven other major ones in the U.S. and Canada since then have spilled more than 3 million gallons of oil, with some cars catching fire or exploding...
The Missing Part of the Unemployment Story Economic Policy Institute ...Unemployment rate if missing workers were looking for work: 9.6%...
Trends in Part-Time Employment Center for Economic and Policy Research ...The number of people working part-time involuntarily is down by 640,000 from its year ago level and by more than 1.6 million from its peak in 2010...
Wal-Mart’s big July 4 lie: This is how it really treats veterans Salon ...on my way to work, I tried to save the lives of several people from a gunman who was behaving erratically and waving a gun at a busy intersection. I still went to work my shift at Wal-Mart. The very next day, I was abruptly fired for making an 18 cent mistake on a workers’ discount card. My manager knew what happened the day before, but it didn’t matter...
On This Fourth of July, Meet Your Unpatriotic Corporations The Nation ...Walgreens, The New York Times reported, is looking to relocate from Illinois to Switzerland, in the process merging with a Swiss corporation and reincorporating itself as a foreign entity. It is, bluntly, an old-fashioned tax dodge, aimed at trimming eleven percentage points off the company’s corporate tax rate. Americans for Tax Fairness estimates that the move will cost US taxpayers more than $4 billion over the next five years...
On the Characteristics of Those Covered under Some Government Programs Econbrowser ...more than half of SNAP recipients are children or the elderly. For the remaining working-age individuals, many of them are currently employed. At least forty percent of all SNAP beneficiaries live in a household with earnings...
Hospitals Are Mining Patients' Credit Card Data to Predict Who Will Get Sick Bloomberg ...Imagine getting a call from your doctor if you let your gym membership lapse, make a habit of buying candy bars at the checkout counter, or begin shopping at plus-size clothing stores. For patients of Carolinas HealthCare System, which operates the largest group of medical centers in North and South Carolina, such a day could be sooner than they think...
Going Without Water in Detroit New York Times ...The average monthly water bill in Detroit is $75 for a family of four — nearly twice the United States average — and the department is increasing rates this month by 8.7 percent...
In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are Washington Post ...Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post...
