Economy

November 21, 2019 - The movement to organize low-wage workers is focusing on the military community of Fayetteville, North Carolina, where earlier this month survivors of the KKK's 1979 massacre of labor organizers offered their insights. 

October 11, 2019 - Amid a grassroots campaign targeting them for financing private prison companies, banks are cutting ties with the industry. Florida-based GEO Group's last remaining banking partner recently announced it would cut ties with the company, and Tennessee-based CoreCivic is also feeling the heat.

October 4, 2019 - The recent commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the bloody Elaine Massacre sought to correct the historical record and start hard conversations, while the community wrestles with the ongoing legacies of racial trauma and injustice.

September 27, 2019 - Local elected officials in the South are creating programs to address growing numbers of homeless people and the broader affordable housing crisis.

September 19, 2019 - Workers from across the low-wage economy convened in Durham, North Carolina, recently to discuss how to build on victories in the fight for a livable wage and union rights in the region.  

August 13, 2019 - The recent massacre at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, is just one of many incidents of gun violence that have taken place at the company's stores, which sell guns and allow customers to carry them inside. Concerned for their own and their customers' safety, Walmart workers want the company to change its firearm policies.

August 2, 2019 - Responding to the Fight for $15 movement, the U.S. House recently voted to raise the federal minimum wage, and a number of states have also raised minimum wages. But progress at the local level has been blocked in some places by state laws preempting such wage hikes — and now labor advocates are taking aim at those laws.

July 19, 2019 - This week the Democratic-controlled U.S. House passed the Raise the Wage Act to gradually increase the hourly minimum wage to $15. The proposal now awaits action in the Republican-controlled Senate, where the bill sits in a committee chaired by Tennessee's Lamar Alexander, who thinks there should be no minimum wage laws at all.

July 3, 2019 - The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been researching how the climate crisis will affect farming, but it's withheld the findings from the public. That's just one example of how the Trump administration is making it harder for farmers across the South — a region especially vulnerable to climate change — to prepare for a warming world.

May 24, 2019 - Just days after McDonald's workers filed over two dozen sexual harassment charges and lawsuits against the fast-food giant, they went on strike in cities across the the South and nation to demand a redress of their grievances.