2014 didn't lack for inspiration from worker activists
Thanks to November's elections, the minimum wage is going up in four states and paid sick leave is becoming law in one ... but workers in many more states can also expect a terrible 2015, thanks to the state legislatures coming under Republican control. It wasn't just the elections bringing good news in 2014, with
momentum behind paid sick leave building, President Obama's administration
strengthening labor law enforcement and looking at
expanding overtime eligibility to cover many more Americans. What's more, workers continue organizing in fast food, at Walmart, and more. The past year saw labor victories in some very unlikely places. But on the other hand, income and
wealth inequality are enormous, and did I mention all those Republicans elected in November?
With all that in mind, here's a round-up of year-end round-ups:
Here's hoping workers continue organizing and building strength in 2015, that sick leave continues to spread, that more states and cities raise the minimum wage, and more.
Continue reading below the fold for some of the week's labor and education news.
- Stop kidding yourself: The police were created to control working class and poor people: Provocative title, and historian Sam Mitrani can back it up.
The police were not created to protect and serve the population. They were not created to stop crime, at least not as most people understand it. And they were certainly not created to promote justice. They were created to protect the new form of wage-labor capitalism that emerged in the mid to late nineteenth century from the threat posed by that system’s offspring, the working class.
This is a blunt way of stating a nuanced truth, but sometimes nuance just serves to obfuscate.
Before the nineteenth century, there were no police forces that we would recognize as such anywhere in the world. In the Northern United States, there was a system of elected constables and sheriffs, much more responsible to the population in a very direct way than the police are today. In the South, the closest thing to a police force was the slave patrols. Then, as Northern cities grew and filled with mostly immigrant wage workers who were physically and socially separated from the ruling class, the wealthy elite who ran the various municipal governments hired hundreds and then thousands of armed men to impose order on the new working class neighborhoods.
- The Trans-Pacific Partnership could be the worst thing Obama ever does.
- When Massachusetts audited its charter schools.
- Ugh, Michigan.