Fight Over Foreign Retail (Walmart!) Entry into India Enters a New Stage

New Orleans      Desperate to hold onto power with national elections coming in 2013 and beset by crises over coal, telecom, and slowing growth, India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, announced modifications in foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail, potentially paving the way for Walmart, Carrefour, Tesco, Metro, and other multi-national companies to enter the growing Indian …

Rap Comes to Remittance Justice Campaign

New Orleans   On ACORN International’s Remittance Justice Campaign too often “civilians,” regular citizens, don’t have a clue about the predatory costs of moving money backwards and forward between where families and workers are now and their home country.   All of this made it exciting to get emails in recent days from ACORN Canada organizers, Jill …

Non-Standard Workers are the New Informal Workforce in Japan

New Orleans   Casual, temporary, irregular (Korea), part-time, and informal are all terms of art in different countries describing everywhere essentially the same global workforce phenomena in the race to the bottom for public and corporate employers sweating labor from workers on a come-as-you-are, no benefits, we-will-call-you-whenever-we-need-you basis.  We learned from hours of intensive dialogue with …