Hillman Judge Ta-Nehisi Coates makes the case for reparations in a cover story at the Atlantic. The piece begins: “Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.”

It’s an important conversation and one that’s long overdue. We at Hillman are biased, but we can’t think of a better person to put forward the moral and historical case for reparations than Mr. Coates. 

When NYU announced a plan to build a campus in Abu Dhabi, a city in the UAE with notoriously lax labor laws, the university pledged to respect the rights of workers. But former workers on the site said their jobs broke virtually every promise NYU made about wages, hours, working conditions, and living standards.

Amongst other complaints, former workers on the site of NYU’s future Abu Dhabi campus say they were beaten by police and deported for striking and that they were forced to live in squalor, work involuntary overtime, and pay huge recruiting fees to get their jobs. 

[Photo credit: Yuwen Memon, Creative Commons.]

• The fight for a $15/hr living wage for the fast food industry has gone global. On Thursday, fast food activists are holding protests in 80 cities across 30 countries, plus 150 strikes in the United States. 

• Ron Oswald, General Secretary of the IUF, explains why fast food workers deserve a raise. 

• New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman explains his administration is doing to combat wage theft in fast food. 

[Photo credit: Light Brigading, Creative Commons.]

Nothing better than the real thing? Well…

Coca-Cola funded Mothers Against Drunk Driving in Public but gave privately to an industry group that campaigned to weaken drunk driving laws, according to private documents obtained by Ryan Grim and Amanda Terkel of Huffington Post. 

[Photo credit: Deus X Florida, Creative Commons.]