Josh Eidelson

Silicon Valley Has Created a Fake Crisis of a Tech Worker Shortage in Order to Exploit Foreign Workers and Drive Down Wages

Along with temporary deportation relief for millions, President Obama’s executive action will increase the number of U.S. college graduates from abroad who can temporarily be hired by U.S. corporations. That hasn’t satisfied tech companies and trade groups, which contend more green cards or guest worker visas are needed to keep tech industries growing because of a shortage of qualified American workers. But scholars say there’s a problem with that argument: The tech worker shortage doesn’t actually exist.

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Fast-Food Worker Strike Is About To Go Global

On May 15, fast food workers plan to mount one-day strikes in 150 U.S. cities, accompanied by protests in thirty countries, labor sources tell Salon. Organizers expect the walkouts to spread for the first time to cities including Philadelphia, Miami, Orlando, and Sacramento, and to involve thousands of total workers, including hundreds each in cities including St. Louis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Oakland, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City.

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“Fox and Friends” Poster Child Accused of Bullying Employees Over Safety Risks

A janitorial company painted by “Fox and Friends” as the victim of attempted pro-union government coercion has in fact been coercing its own employees to hide safety risks from the government, employees charged to Salon.

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Fox Faux Pas: Company Allegedly Bullied by Workers Actually Coerced Them Into Hiding Safety Violations

A janitorial company painted by “Fox and Friends” as the victim of attempted pro-union government coercion has in fact been coercing its own employees to hide safety risks from the government, employees charged to Salon.

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Wal-Mart Manager Speaks out About His Store’s Ugly Reality

President Obama sparked a new round of big business ire this month, directing the Labor Department to reform rules that exclude salaried managers making over $23,660 a year from overtime protections.

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Scalia Licks His Chops: Upcoming SCOTUS Case May Be Even Worse than Citizens United

Sometime in the next three months – perhaps as early as next week – the Supreme Court will issue its next big campaign finance decision, a ruling that reformers worry will further open floodgates of one-percenter campaign cash. The case, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, concerns a challenge by the RNC and conservative CEO Shaun McCutcheon to the federal laws restricting how much one person can donate to candidates and party committees each cycle.

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'Code Words for Race': What’s Really Behind GOP’s Poverty and Welfare Obsession

“We have got this tailspin of culture,” Paul Ryan told ex-Reagan drug czar Bill Bennett Wednesday, “in our inner cities in particular, of men not working, and just generations of men not even thinking about working, or learning to value the culture of work. So there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.” Under fire from politicians and pundits, the Wisconsin congressman – perhaps the congressional GOP’s leading voice on fighting poverty – backtracked but didn’t apologize, saying he’d been “inarticulate,” and that his cultural critique applied to “society as a whole.”

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Chris Christie’s Charter School Nightmare: “White Flight, and They’re Bankrupting Us”

While New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie deals with burgeoning scandals surrounding accusations he used the Port Authority and development deals for political ends, he now finds himself in a flap surrounding charter schools in Hoboken.

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Say Goodbye to Public Schools: Diane Ravitch Warns Some Cities Will Soon Have None

Once a George H.W. Bush education official and an advocate for greater testing-based accountability, Diane Ravitch has in recent years become the nation’s highest-profile opponent of Michelle Rhee’s style of charter-based education reform (one also espoused by Barack Obama).

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18 Outrageous Things CPAC's Right-Wingers Have Said in Public

Starting this week, conservative activists converge in Maryland – along with a healthy complement of journalists (this one included) – to hear from top Republicans and leading voices of the modern right. Controversy is basically inevitable.

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McDonald's Admits in Private That Strikes Have Hurt Its Bottom Line, and It May Have to Raise Wages

Worker strikes and social media shaming “can adversely affect us,” and “increasing public focus” on “income inequality” could spur higher wages, fast food giant McDonald’s acknowledged in an annual report filed Tuesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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Cult-like, Corrupt and Christian Conservative: Inside the Campus Group Creating Wal-Mart Managers

For decades, the campus group Students in Free Enterprise has drawn major funding and leadership from Wal-Mart, and channeled scores of students into the retail giant’s management ranks. Renamed Enactus in 2012, the group calls itself “the world’s best-known and most successful program helping university students to create community empowerment projects …” But California State University, Chico, accounting professor and former SIFE insider Curtis DeBerg told Salon that the well-heeled group served as “really a marketing branch to support business leaders who supported SIFE,” and that his decade as one of SIFE’s Sam Walton fellows was marked by fraud, turf war and falsehood. “There’s something entirely inconsistent about servant leadership as Wal-Mart practices it,” said DeBerg, the founder of the now-rival spinoff Students for the Advancement of Global Entrepreneurship. DeBerg’s memoir, “How High Is Up?: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of a Sam M. Walton SIFE Fellow,” will be released next month.

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ESPN Sports Analyst's Major Gaffe Shows How Backwards America Still Is on Gay Rights

About four years before I came out as queer, a high school teacher asked our class how many of us would be comfortable changing in front of a gay person. I don’t think anyone raised their hand. I’m sure I didn’t.

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“Cynical and Diabolical”: Issa Attracts Allies in Quest to Demolish Postal Service

The Postal Service’s largest union has harsh words for Rep. Darrell Issa, and is raising alarm over a pilot partnership with Staples, which it warns is a stalking horse for privatization – a goal the union alleges draws support or indifference from key Democrats.

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Amazon Keeps Unions Out By Keeping Workers in Fear, Says Organizer

After Amazon vanquished a rare U.S. union effort last week in a 21-to-6 vote, keeping the retail giant union-free across the United States, a union spokesperson blamed that result on a corporate campaign to make workers fear for their jobs — and told Salon a much larger union campaign could be ahead at Amazon.

Josh Eidelson
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How Amazon Continues to Get Away With Abusing Its Workers

After Amazon vanquished a rare U.S. union effort last week in a 21-to-6 vote, keeping the retail giant union-free across the United States, a union spokesperson blamed that result on a corporate campaign to make workers fear for their jobs — and told Salon a much larger union campaign could be ahead at Amazon.

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Ailes' Biographer Says Fox News Empire is Crumbling

Gabriel Sherman’s exhaustive, inflammatory biography of Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, released days ago by Random House, has already prompted network pushback. “While we have not read the book,” a Fox News spokesperson told the New York Times, “the only reality here is that Gabe was not provided any direct access to Roger Ailes and the book was never fact-checked with Fox News.” Sherman’s 538-page tome, “The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News – and Divided a Country,” is the product of three years of work and hundreds of interviews. It paints Ailes as a transformative figure in American media and politics – and includes alleged episodes of violence, paranoia, bigotry and sexual harassment.

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Walmart Accused of Illegally Firing Workers Across the Country

Wal-Mart illegally disciplined, threatened and surveilled workers — including unlawfully firing 19 people — according to a complaint released by the National Labor Relations Board Wednesday afternoon.

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Keith Ellison Blasts Inaction on Government-Backed Poverty: “The Most Remarkable Dodge I’ve Ever Seen”

One day after a top Obama administration official deflected a congressman’s call for executive action to raise labor standards for contractors, activists Wednesday announced the filing of a new Department of Labor complaint over alleged wage theft in a government building. The complaint alleges that dozens of workers in D.C.’s government-owned Union Station are owed over $3 million in back pay and damages for rampant failure to pay minimum wage or overtime.

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Congressmembers Urge Obama to Raise Pay of Two Million Federal Low-Wage Workers

One day after a top Obama administration official deflected a congressman’s call for executive action to raise labor standards for contractors, activists Wednesday announced the filing of a new Department of Labor complaint over alleged wage theft in a government building. The complaint alleges that dozens of workers in D.C.’s government-owned Union Station are owed over $3 million in back pay and damages for rampant failure to pay minimum wage or overtime.

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How Elizabeth Warren Is Trying to Keep Employers from Digging into Your Credit Score

Decrying a “rigged” system and the long overhang of the 2008 crash, Sen. Elizabeth Warren Tuesday introduced a bill to ban mandatory pre-employment credit checks. “This act is about basic fairness,” the Massachusetts Democrat told reporters on a Tuesday call. “Let people compete for jobs on the merits, not whether they already have enough money to pay all their bills.”

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Tens of Thousands Protest, Over 100 Arrested in Black Friday Challenge to Wal-Mart

Organizers say 111 people were arrested in eight Black Friday civil disobedience actions against Wal-Mart, with more arrests expected at a ninth and final such demonstration now underway in San Leandro, California. Those actions are among 1,500 total protests promised for [Friday] by the union-backed group OUR Walmart, which last year said it mobilized 400-some Wal-Mart employees to strike.

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Massive Black Friday Strike and Arrests Planned As Workers Defy Wal-Mart

Defying the nation’s top employer and a business model that defines the new U.S. economy, Wal-Mart employees and allies will try to oust shopping headlines with strike stories, and throw a retail giant off its heels on what should be its happiest day of the year. By day’s end, organizers expect 1,500 total protests in cities ranging from Los Angeles, Calif., to Wasilla, Alaska, including arrests in nine cities: Seacaucus, New Jersey; Alexandria, Virginia; Dallas; Minneapolis; Chicago; Seattle; and Ontario, San Leandro, and Sacramento, California.

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Ashton Kutcher Battles Wal-Mart In Heated Twitter Face-Off Over Poverty Wages

Celebrity actor/producer Ashton Kutcher and retail giant Wal-Mart had a spirited Twitter debate Tuesday over Wal-Mart workers’ wages.

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Michelle Rhee Revolution Faces Massive Threat - And New Accusations

Education reform lightning rod Paul Vallas – who courted controversy helming school districts in Philadelphia, New Orleans and Chicago — isn’t on the ballot tomorrow. But a school board election in Bridgeport, Conn. – the latest district to tap Vallas to oversee reforms — could effectively spell his fate. Tomorrow’s vote will offer the latest referendum on the bipartisan, billionaire-backed mainstream education reform movement, and on a multi-year effort by local Democrats – aided by the likes of Michael Bloomberg and Michelle Rhee — to defeat or disempower labor-backed dissenters.

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'Riots Always Begin When People Can't Afford Food:' Food Stamp Shutdown Starts Today

Food stamp recipients face a massive benefit cut set to kick in when stimulus funds expire Friday. The nationwide cut “is equivalent to about 16 meals a month for a family of three,” according to a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis using the USDA’s “Thrifty Food Plan.” CBPP called the roughly $5 billion annual cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program “unprecedented” in “depth and breadth.”

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Ex-GOP Senator: Republican Party Totally Disconnected from Reality

Lowell Weicker served three terms in the U.S. Senate from Connecticut as a Republican, before being defeated by then-Democrat Joe Lieberman – with an assist from influential conservatives – in 1988. Two years later, in a rare feat, he won Connecticut’s gubernatorial election as a third-party candidate.

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Tea Partiers V. Millennials: Why the Far Right Disdains Young People, Even Their Own Kids

The past weeks’ showdown in Washington, D.C., has shocked and perplexed some observers. Theda Skocpol was not among them. Skocpol, a veteran Harvard professor, is the author of books on topics ranging from the politics of the U.S. welfare state (Protecting Soldiers and Mothers) to the state of grassroots political engagement (Diminished Democracy), and of the definitive social science tome on the Tea Party (The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, with Vanessa Williamson).

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Ex-GOP Insider Unloads: Blame “Neo-Confederate Insurrectionists” for Shutdown!

The government shutdown, and the prospect of an unprecedented debt default, have sparked a new wave of debate about whether the system of government set forth in the Constitution is equipped to handle the tactics taken up by the modern GOP. Salon spoke Friday with Mike Lofgren, who worked as a Republican congressional staffer from 1983 to 2011 (including 16 years as a senior analyst on the budget Ccommittees of the Senate and House) before leaving and writing the best-seller “The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.”

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'I Worked All Week for Free?': The Horrifying, True Story of $0 Paychecks

In the annals of degrading, infuriating labor practices, this one may take a prize: Meet the cleaning workers who received … zero-dollar paychecks.

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U.S. Immigration Officials: Pot Smokers Get Out; Rapists You Can Stay

A new report suggests that a suspected undocumented immigrant convicted of possessing pot may be more likely to face immigration detention than one who’s been convicted of rape.

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