There’s a real business advantage to treating employees well, says Jim Sinegal, CEO of Costco Corporation, an international membership warehouse club. Boasting the lowest employee turnover rate in retailing, Costco pays 40 percent more than its closest rival, Sam’s Club, and provides health insurance to more than 90 percent of its employees. “Wall Street is in the business of making money between now and next Tuesday,” Sinegal says. “We’re in the business of building an organization, an institution that we...

Photo Credit: Patrick Hoesly via Compfight cc Following up on last week’s proposal and discussion about the future of the Detroit Institute of Arts in the midst of the city of Detroit’s ongoing budgetary woes, mentator Terry Teachout penned a piece for the WSJ about the need for Detroit’s leaders to step up: “Protecting Detroit’s Artwork Is a Job for Detroit.” Among other things, Teachout writes, “Any argument to keep Detroit’s masterpieces in Detroit has got to make sense to...

Ever since the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that requiring most employers to cover birth control, abortificients and abortions as part of employee health care coverage, there has been a firestorm of attention focused on the mandate. Both secular and religious employers have fought the order, stating that it violates their moral and/or religious principles to pay for these things, which many do not believe fall into the category of “health care.” (See Acton PowerBlog posts here,...

One of the core principles of the Acton Institute mitment to wealth creation since material impoverishment undermines the conditions that allow humans to flourish. We consider helping our fellow citizens to escape material deprivation to be one of the most morally significant economic concerns of our age. But how to do we gauge whether our neighbors are able to improve their economic security? A key metric that is often used is e or social mobility, the ability of an individual...

Food has been an essential part of Christian culture since Jesus shared a last meal with his Apostles in Jerusalem before his crucifixion. So it’s not surprising that Christians — especially young Christians in urban areas — are the epicurean hobby culture of “foodies.” But as Erik Bonkovsky, a pastor in Richmond, Virginia, says, a truly great and thoroughly Christian food scene is one that blesses the privileged and under-privileged alike: Foodie culture—particularly with a local and healthy dimension—is now...

When the Obamacare legislation was rushed through Congress in 2010, Bishop Gregory Palmer, president of the Council of Bishops for The United Methodist Church (UMC), said he “rejoiced” at the passage of the bill because it aligns with the denomination’s values. But now, many Methodists bishops — and other Christian clergy — are wishing they hadn’t waited for the bill to pass to find out what was in it. According to a statement released by the UMC’s General Board of...

Writing over at the Live58 blog, Catherine Sinclair describes her transition from uncertainty regarding GMOs (genetically-modified organisms) to outright opposition: “After doing some more research, e to the conclusion that we should avoid GMO as much as possible.” This a conclusion that we might think is counter-intuitive, to say the least, for an mitted to ending the scourge of global hunger and poverty. Sinclair’s main indictment of es down to the agribusiness giant Monsanto: “Because they panies seeking profit, seed...

By failing to recognize the importance of religion and its relationship to human rights, says Roger Trigg, European courts are progressively eroding religious liberty: [T]he Council of Europe affirmed in 2007 that “states must require religious leaders to take an unambiguous stand in favour of the precedence of human rights, as set forth in the European Convention of Human Rights, over any religious principle.” It is ironic that freedom of religion is expressly protected by the Convention and that the...

There’s a new front in the struggle for religious liberty, says Brian Simboli: Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. FOIA’s implementation is broken, and defenders of religious liberty ought to seek ways to fix it. . . . t would be extraordinarily naïve to assume that threats to religious liberty are going to diminish ing decades. Religious institutions will have to seek ways to check government power and seek bureaucratic accountability. Improving our FOIA system now will prove a boon...

McDonald’s has been under fire over its Practical Money Skills Budget Journal, a planning tool designed to help employees organize their personal finances.The tool’s sample budget fails to account for a variety of first-world expenses, leading to a predictable cacophony of folks calling for newer, fresher, more enlightened price-fixing tricks. Stephen Colbert channels the sentiments well. Sample Budget for McDonald’s Employees On the finer points, it can be tempting to get into the weeds, and many already have. Some have...