Payday lending has been denounced as "a scourge on vulnerable citizens" and condemned as "modern day usury." Across the country, consumer advocates are fighting to rein in the high-cost, short-term loans that trap low- and moderate-income borrowers in thousands of dollars of high-interest debt....

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed 43 years ago today. The assassination occurred as he was supporting a strike of municipal sanitation workers, standing up for the principle that “every working American should earn enough to live a decent life” in the words of his son Martin Luther...

“Across the country, taxpayers are providing pensions, benefits and job security protections for public workers that almost no one in the private sector enjoys.” wrote Mayor Bloomberg recently in the New York Times, “Taxpayers simply cannot afford to continue paying these costs, which are growing at rates far outpacing...

It was cold out, but the workers crowding the steps of City Hall Wednesday morning were fired up. New Yorkers shouted in support of public workers in Wisconsin battling their governor’s effort to destroy their unions by taking away workers’ rights to bargain and their unions’ ability to support...

A highly profitable business plans to cut the pay of its frontline employees because, of course, it could always be more profitable. The only obstacle? That darn union...

It sounds like the story of last year's strike at the upstate New York Motts plant But it's also my tale...

Adapted from authors' remarks at the Urban Justice Center Human Rights Luncheon, February 3 2011

You don't have to work at a think tank to realize that these are dark days for working people. To begin with, millions of Americans aren’t working. Despite recent economic growth, we...

Cutting public pensions won't improve the lives of ordinary New Yorkers. Giving tax breaks to the state's highest income residents won't benefit most of us either. But at least one reform promoted by Governor Andrew Cuomo has the potential to truly transform New York's politics, putting people, rather...

Public spending is the number one problem. Taxes are too high. And we've got to eliminate regulation. It sounds a lot like the rhetoric of the House's new Republican majority, the folks who strenuously expressed their concern over deficits, then pushed to extend the deficit-ballooning Bush tax for the wealthiest...

It's the city's ninth round of budget cuts in three fiscal years, and the most brutal. Mayor Bloomberg calls for 6,201 layoffs of public workers in the 2011 and 2012 fiscal years. Instead of responding at our firehouses, serving our frail elderly, and helping...

Should we tear down the city's middle class? Or work to turn lousy jobs into good ones? That's the policy choice facing New York's city and state leaders. So far, their decisions aren't encouraging: for years New York has failed to use its economic development programs to promote the...

It's difficult to imagine anything more basic to a free economy than the right of an employee to be paid for his or her work. Yet this fundamental right is routinely violated in New York's low-wage industries. Research from the National Employment Law Project concludes that a fifth of...

As New York continues to waver on enacting overwhelmingly popular legislation that would guarantee working people the right to earn paid sick time, other cities are catching up fast.

Consider Philadelphia, where I had the opportunity to attend an event on earned paid sick leave yesterday. Spurred by...

Last week, the New York Times reported on Library Systems & Services, a private, for-profit company that an increasing number of towns are contracting to take over their local public libraries. The company pares budgets and turns a profit by, among others things, replacing long-term employees with those who...

This week brings a surge of new data affirming that city and state employees are compensated less than comparable private sector workers. New studies, conducted by researchers at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Rutgers University, and...

Talk to a working New Yorker, and the odds are one in four that she belongs to a union. That's a rate of union membership more than twice as high as the country as a whole, note CUNY professor Ruth Milkman and graduate student Laura Braslow in their new...

The Port of Los Angeles' innovative Clean Truck Program is legally in the clear -- and so it's time for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to follow those tire tracks.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder upheld the Port of Los Angeles'...

A cognitive dissonance animates the Right in America, and the New York Times nails it with today's front page case study of Alaska. The state depends more than any other on public support, from its earliest days when "the federal government expended great amounts of money carving this young...

The fiscal relief bill signed into law by President Obama on Tuesday will unquestionably benefit New York City and other states and municipalities across the country. At a time of sluggish job growth and straight-jacketed local budgets, the bill will help cities and states to maintain critical public services,...

Wall Street devastated America's cities. Consider the neighborhoods dotted with foreclosed homes; the jobs vanished with the bursting of the housing bubble pumped up by bankers; the public services slashed when the Wall Street-induced recession decimated city revenues. To add insult to injury, BusinessWeek describes how the same banks...