Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate

First, an update on wage theft. Celebrity chef Bobby Flay has joined Tom Colicchio as a defendant in a class action lawsuit charging wage theft. This suit was filed on January 16, 2009 by the same law firm that initiated the Colicchio class action. Flay’s enterprises are under the umbrella of the firm Bold Foods LLC, which operates several restaurants in New York City and elsewhere. The charges are virtually the same as those against Chef Colicchio’s company and eateries. When I first learned of the new lawsuit, I immediately assumed that it was brought by the same law firm. Courts have become the major venue for workers seeking to redress workplace wrongs. The main reason for this is that the workers’ weapon of choice, the labor union, is usually no longer available to them. The nation’s union strongholds have been battered to the ground by global economic forces, themselves the consequence of the corporate/government onslaught against workers and the ineptitude of most of our industrial unions to defend their members against it. What is more, it has become extremely difficult for employees to form unions, as I discussed in my post on the Employee Free Choice Act. This has left most workers without collective options. It was inevitable, then, that enterprising law firms, which began to see more clients seeking redress for wage theft, would see a legal plum ripe for the plucking. They could make a lot of money and do some good at the same time. Labor lawyer and writer, Tom Geoghegan, argues in his book, See You in Court: How the Right Made America a Lawsuit Nation, that our infamous (to the right wing, that is. I am a firm believer in lawsuits) litigiousness is the result of corporate America’s denial to us of any collective rights. Read More

I always told my students that it is necessary to examine many statistics to understand what is going on in the economy. The growth of the Gross Domestic Product (roughly our total yearly production) is often used as a measure of the economy’s health. However, the GDP could be growing rapidly, while the growth could be maldistributed. Those already rich could be getting most of the additioanl income generated by the higher output. Growing inequality has an independent effect on a wide range of social indicators. In my book, Naming the System, I wrote: Read More

Note: Parts of this are taken from the new edition of my book, Why Unions Matter, which will be published by Monthly Review Press next month. Read More