Boss Watch

Illegal activities of Southern Bosses for the week ending on Friday, September 8 LOUISIANA THIEVES The U.S. Department of Labor has obtained a consent judgment requiring the operator of a New Orleans-area home healthcare agency to pay 80 workers a total of $630,000 in back wages and damages after the employer misclassified them as independent…

Illegal activities of Southern Bosses for the week ending on Friday, September 1 ALABAMA KILLER Last year, Brett Savage, a 36-year-old communications technician with the Alabama Forestry Commission and a resident of Deatsville, in Elmore County, was killed instantly when the communications tower he was helping a crew remove unexpectedly fell on top of him…

We have an Alabama employer on the list this week, and so many companies stealing from their employees and putting them in illegally-dangerous workplaces that we didn’t have room for EEOC cases this week. It’s bad, folks! Illegal activities of Southern Bosses for the week ending on Friday, August 25 ALABAMA MUTILATOR The Texas-based operator…

Illegal activities of Southern Bosses for the week ending on Friday, August 18 TENNESSEE RETALIATOR The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a lower court’s ruling that a Memphis Starbucks violated the National Labor Relations Act when it fired seven workers over union organizing efforts. The NLRA gives workers the right to form a…

We’ve had a great reaction to our most recent recurring segment on The Valley Labor Report, so we’re going to be sending this out as a newsletter every week. It’s important that people understand how often bosses break the law – with working people as their victims – because of how skewed our media structure…

The issue of child labor in the United States seems to be only just warming up, as the U.S. Department of Labor releases some startling statistics in the middle of the investigation it has been carrying out across the Nation, with a special emphasis on the South. According to a statement the DOL released about…

ov. Kay Ivey Friday forced Secretary of Early Childhood Education Barbara Cooper to resign over a book designed to train teachers to be aware of the different backgrounds and challenges of their students. In a Friday afternoon news release, Gina Maiola, communications director for the governor’s office, said Ivey had accepted Cooper’s resignation after learning…

eamsters Local 89 Sysco drivers voted overwhelmingly in support of ratifying a new offer from the company, concluding a strike that lasted nearly two weeks. The drivers had joined the Teamsters in 2022 due to issues involving wages, benefits, workplace safety, and destructively long work shifts, and since organizing there’s been a bit of back-and-forth…

The Alabama Democratic Party approved new bylaws Saturday that eliminated youth, LGBTQ+ and disabled caucuses and reduced the powers of others. The proposed bylaws, which passed the State Democratic Executive Committee (SDEC) 63-49, eliminated the three caucuses because they don’t represent 15% of the executive council. The bylaws also reduced the powers of affirmative action;…

en workers at Hearst Magazine in Birmingham, Alabama, staged a walkout recently in protest of bad faith negotiations. These workers successfully voted to unionize in 2020, joining up with the Writer’s Guild of America East, but claim that, since then, they have been stuck in “negotiation hell” with their employer, who has consistently and intentionally…

e tend to think of child labor as a thing of the past, a peculiarity of the early days of the Industrial Age. We call to mind black and white photographs of kids laboring in factories and warehouses, blanketed in grime and soot. The reality is that child labor is still “alive and well,” even…

o you’ve been called into the boss’s office…and it ain’t to exchange pleasantries! Do you think the meeting will lead to discipline? Is this an “investigatory interview” being conducted? Are you working under a union contract? Are you a public school employee in Alabama? Or are you working in a place without any union protections?…