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Mike Elk
Mike Elk is the senior labor reporter at Payday Report and member of the Washington-Baltimore NewsGuild. He previously served as senior labor reporter at POLITICO and at In These Times Magazine.
Articles by this author
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Views Sunday, October 16, 2016 Lawmakers Want to Close the Loophole That Pays Disabled Workers Pennies An Hour Recently released Census data reveal that, in 2015, the poverty rate dropped significantly for most demographic groups. One of the only groups who didn’t see an improvement were people with disabilities: the percentage of disabled Americans (age 18-64) living in poverty increased from 25.9% to 26.5... Read more |
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Views Friday, July 29, 2016 Millennial Sanders Activists Give New Energy to Southern Organizing CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE – Khristy Wilkinson, a 36-year-old, tattoo-adorned, stay-at-home mom, doesn’t look like your typical Eastern Tennessee politician. Before this year, she had never even considered running for public office, but says that she was inspired to run by the success of Bernie Sanders... Read more |
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Views Monday, July 11, 2016 The Next Step for Organized Labor? People in Prison. In the early 2000s, the small but militant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) launched union drives at Starbucks and Jimmy John’s. At the time, many in the mainstream labor movement scratched their heads. Traditionally, labor groups believed that the high turnover of fast food workers would make... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, February 18, 2014 How Sweetheart Deals Hurt Labor The key to organizing workers in areas like the South, where unions hold little sway, is building trust. Read more |
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Views Sunday, February 16, 2014 After Historic UAW Defeat at Tennessee Volkswagen Plant, Theories Abound “I am excited,” auto worker Justin King told me as he put on his cowboy boots to get ready for the victory party planned for late Friday night. Read more |
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Views Thursday, January 09, 2014 Obama Administration Stays Quiet as Boeing Strikes Major Blow to Pensions On Friday, yet another nail was put in the coffin of the defined-benefit pension in America. According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) , the percentage of U.S. Read more |
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Views Tuesday, September 17, 2013 A 98-Year-Old Labor Reporter Who Loved Avant-Garde Music This week, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka ran unopposed for the presidency of the AFL-CIO—but only because his opponent, labor activist Harry Kelber, died before the election. Read more |
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Views Thursday, April 25, 2013 Texas Explosion: Gov’t Shared Info for Anti-Terrorism, But Not Workplace Safety The twin tragedies of last week—the Boston Marathon bombing and the West Texas Chemical and Fertilizer plant explosion—received vastly unequal media attention. Read more |
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Views Tuesday, April 23, 2013 An Explosion the Media Ignores: The Texas Fertilizer Plant Disaster Cannot Be Forgotten Read more |
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Views Saturday, July 07, 2012 Is Union Busting to Blame for Power Outages in D.C.? On Thursday, 15,091 Washington, D.C.-area residents were without power for the sixth day in a row, according to utility company Pepco spokesman Marcus Beal. As D.C. residents face record heat waves, many are upset and attribute the lack of power to incompetence on Pepco's end. Read more |