Two Jimmy John's employees sue the corporation for wage theft, alleging that the corporations has created a culture within its multitudinous franchises that encourages or forces managers to clock folks out before they can get overtime even if they haven't finished their work, among other things. McDonald's workers have hit their corporate employer with the same charge, and the NLRB has ruled that workers can hold the parent corporation responsible for the actions of its franchisees -- particularly if the corporation has essentially made the franchise owners commit wage theft, I would think.
Gar Alperovitz observes the Market Basket situation in New England -- where workers have defended a good CEO against the bad corporate owners who forced him out -- and wonders if the worker-owned corporation model could solve the problem. The main problem I foresee is that too many CEOs are too greedy or too co-opted by Wall Street to let their corporations go, but n.b. that though the number of worker-owned corporations declined from 2002 to 2011, the number of employee owners actually increased over that time, from 10 million to 13.5 million.
The FCC still might whiff on net neutrality, but the FCC might actually expand its 2012 rule mandating online public disclosure of political campaign spending on the traditional "over-the-air" TV stations to cable, satellite, and radio stations. The effort's supporters note the quickness with which the FCC responded to their petition, as well as the FCC's inclusion of radio, which the petitioners did not include. I'm as much an optimist as anyone, but I'll be happier when I see results. (If I get action alerts that could help produce those results, of course I'll pass them along.)
David Morris at On the Commons describes how labor solidarity thwarted the U.S. Postal Service's plan to essentially privatize some of its more common functions at "retail partners" like Staples. Postal unions were able to get Staples to shut down its plan by getting other unions -- including the American Federation of Teachers, because you know how much teachers need writing supplies -- to boycott Staples as long as it participated in the USPS plan to outsource basic postal services to low-paid workers, and it worked. It'll have to work again and again and again, but it's a fight worth fighting.
Finally, I've long warned that Rand Paul is not the independent thinker his father is, but I didn't even know that he said he "would not rule out" supporting air strikes in Iraq back in June, explaining that -- just kidding, he didn't actually explain very much of anything, but just changed the subject to how disappointed he is that Iraqi soldiers are shedding their uniforms and running and wondering why we have to do their fighting for them, which he's nonetheless apparently willing to continue to do. The article lists other recent and no less telling sins as well.
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