Group items tagged

Just months after publication of The Jungle, federal legislation was passed mandating improved inspection of meat, as well as requiring labels listing the ingredients of canned food products. The legislation had been proposed years earlier, but a combination of business interests resisted it, arguing that it was not the business of the federal government to regulate what people ate. The Jungle demonstratedPage 145  |  Top of Article clearly that people had no way of knowing what was in canned food, and therefore needed government regulation to keep foods safe.

While cataloguing assorted evils with the tenacity and sharp eye of the best investigative journalist, he uncovers a cynical, dismissive attitude to food safety in the fast food industry and widespread circumvention of the government's efforts at regulation

The minimum wage in Washington state goes up 37 cents on Jan. 1, to $9.04 an hour. Washington is one of only 10 states that ensure by law that their minimum wage keeps up with inflation

For a full-time worker, the higher minimum wage will mean about $770 more dollars a year.

Ehrenreich earned just over $1,000 per month. After paying for basic needs, however, she was left with $22. In addition to being low-paying, the two jobs required workers to be on their feet all day, with breaks only for restroom use, no facilities for lunch, and no health or retirement benefits.

A McDonald's worker in Union City, Ga., was arrested and jailed Thursday night for putting too much salt and pepper on a police officer's hamburger

Recognizing that the name he was given at birth was forced on his ancestors by the White people who at some point had owned his ancestors

Louise Little, traumatized by the horrific murder of her husband, cheated of the insurance money she should have received at his death and unable to find work to support her children was further victimized when the government imprisoned her in a mental institution, seized and scattered her children into various foster homes.

Conventional wisdom says that while some disparities remain, things have generally advanced for Black people in America and today they are advancing still. People like Obama and Oprah are held up as proof of this.

Take employment: Black people remain crowded into the lowest rungs of the ladder...that is, if they can find work at all. While many of the basic industries that once employed Black people have closed down, study after study shows employers to be more likely to hire a white person with a criminal record than a Black person without one, and 50% more likely to follow up on a resume with a “white-sounding” name than an identical resume with a “Black-sounding”2 name. In New York City, the rate of unemployment for Black men is fully 48%

Black infants face mortality rates comparable to those in the Third World country of Malaysia, and African-Americans generally are infected by HIV at rates that rival those in sub-Saharan Africa. Overall the disparities in healthcare are so great that one former U.S. Surgeon General recently wrote, “If we had eliminated disparities in health in the last century, there would have been 85,000 fewer black deaths overall in 2000.”5

The benefits big business receives for their donations to political parties are endless. Not only can a corporation get tax cuts, they can get negative tax rates. This means, not only do they pay zero dollars in taxes , but they also get additional profits at tax time. "Texaco, for example, received a tax rebate of $67.76 million, which meant that it paid taxes at a rate of negative 37.2 percent..." (Washington Post, October 20, 2000)

Over the next 40 years, unions such as the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) were able to improve both the pay and working conditions of meat packing employees in the U.S. The UPWA was also known for its progressive ideals and its support of the civil rights movement during the 1960s.

Developments such as improved distribution channels allowed meat packing companies to move out of urban, union-dominated centers and relocate to rural areas closer to livestock feedlots.

By the late 1990s, the meat packing industry had consolidated such that the top four firms accounted for approximately 50 percent of all U.S. poultry and pork production and 80 percent of all beef production.

Competition and low profit margins generate a corporate motive for maximum productivity, and deregulation has shredded health and safety standards.

A study by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS; now the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services) in 1997 found that one-fourth of the workers in seven meatpacking plants in Iowa and Nebraska had “questionable” documents. The INS's Operation Vanguard in 1999 rounded up immigrants in slaughterhouses, bringing charges that employers and the government colluded to prevent workers from organizing unions.

Farm prices dropped to record lows and bitter farmers tried to ward off foreclosers with pitchforks. By the dawn of the next decade, 4,340,000 Americans were out of work. More than eight million were on the street a year later. Laid-off workers agitated for drastic government remedies. More than 32,000 other businesses went bankrupt and at least 5,000 banks failed. Wretched men, including veterans, looked for work, hawked apples on sidewalks, dined in soup kitchens, passed the time in shantytowns dubbed "Hoovervilles," and some moved between them in railroad boxcars. It was a desperate time for families, starvation stalked the land, and a great drought ruined numerous farms, forcing mass migration.