Economy

July 19, 2017 - The historic link between workers in the South Carolina city and the organizer training school in Tennessee was revitalized when a group of Raise Up for $15 activists from Charleston traveled there recently with others from around the South to strategize about what's next for the movement.

June 16, 2017 - Rural areas draw the ire of Trump opponents on the left and right who charge that residents voted against their own interests. But in the South, which has the country's biggest rural Black population and growing numbers of rural Hispanics, many of the rural communities most threatened by Trump's policies did not vote for him.  

June 15, 2017 - A new report from the National Domestic Worker's Alliance and the Institute for Women's Policy Research documents the vulnerability of Black women in the U.S. — and especially in the South, where voter ID and right-to-work laws are prevalent and most state legislatures have refused to expand Medicaid.

May 11, 2017 - The construction industry is thriving in big cities across the South, but a new report finds workers contending with unsafe conditions, low pay and a lack of basic employment benefits.

May 2, 2017 - The Trump administration is reviewing President Obama's five-year plan that closed the Atlantic and other waters to offshore drilling through 2022. The GOP says Atlantic drilling would create hundreds of thousands of jobs, but it's basing the claims on an industry-funded report that's been debunked for omitting crucial data.

April 14, 2017 - The 35 percent federal corporate income tax rate is a myth, according to a new Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy report that studied 258 consistently profitable Fortune 500 firms over an eight-year period. Among the sectors that paid the least were electric utilities and oil, gas and pipeline companies.

April 7, 2017 - GOP lawmakers have introduced legislation to drastically limit damages that agricultural operations pay in civil cases where they've been found to cause harm. The measure disadvantages the communities of color most likely to be located near the state's hog farms but would help a Chinese-owned pork producer currently facing dozens of such lawsuits.

March 31, 2017 - The main contractor for four nuclear reactors under construction in Georgia and South Carolina declared itself broke this week due to massive cost overruns on the projects. Ratepayers have already forked over billions of dollars for the long-delayed reactors, but their future is now uncertain.

March 30, 2017 - At the time of his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was in Memphis, Tennessee, preparing to march with the city's striking sanitation workers. Labor protests on the anniversary of his death next week will continue the work he was doing during his final days to connect race and class.

March 29, 2017 - Following Congress's failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal announced he was exploring Medicaid expansion under the law while Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe renewed his expansion quest. They join North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, who announced earlier this month that he'd seek to join the four other Southern states that have already expanded the program.