Working Life

It is the strangest contradiction: things have not been so bad for workers probably since the Great Depression, with wages declining, health care costs going up, pensions becoming a thing of the past. People are really angry and frustrated. Yet, at the same time, unions continue to decline in numbers and power.

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One of the most powerful weapons used against unions is to essentially write them out of history: children don’t learn about unions in schools. Most politicians only mention unions when they are slumming for a check for their campaigns or they promise to put on sneakers and walk picket lines when elected but somehow that promise is forgotten once the election is over; they talk great rhetoric about the “middle class” but you almost never hear, unprompted and certainly not in front of crowds outside a union hall, a great speech about unions and their central place in making a healthy economy. Which is why the despicable refusal to elect Marvin Miller to baseball’s Hall of Fame matters–and it should matter to every person who cares about unions, even if you’ve never watched a minute of baseball in your life.

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Where do you start to comment when you read a piece that is, at best, deeply spineless, and, at worse, completely clueless? We cease to be surprised by the relentless foolishness on the part of the transcribers of press releases (formerly called “journalists”). But, though I am not surprised, I can’t let these things go. In this case, it’s a dumb piece called, “Standard of Living Is in the Shadows as Election Issue”.

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   This is one reason people do not understand how the economy really works–because transcribers of press releases (formerly known as "journalists") don’t do their jobs. A basic point of journalism is tell the reader, fairly soon, WHY something happened…well, if you read this story, you don’t get there until it’s way too late: Investors [...]

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    It won’t be long before you hear–because it’s part of the framing of Democrats and Republicans alike, and traditional media "analysts" who haven’t a clue what they are taking about when it comes to economics–that unions are in trouble because of the "new economy" (which means, to some people, the industrial base is [...]

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   Jammed in yesterday with the thousands of others of people in Foley Square, I turned to look at the crowd all around. I felt an incredible burst of optimism. I turned to one friend and said, "looks like the revolution will happen before I die." We laughed. I hope people hold on to the [...]

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   I’m going to start by saying something entirely unoriginal: the traditional press has its head up its ass, and is thoroughly incapable of looking at itself and understanding that most transcribers of press releases (formerly known as "journalists") are entirely not qualified to write about the economy or work and, indeed, are oiling the [...]

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   Apparently, in the alternate universe Republicans inhabit, socialism is on the march and the attack against the "free market" is unrelenting. Where? At the National Labor Relations Board, of course. The truth is–shocking, I know–quite different, and it speaks volumes about the playing field for workers in the real world.    The NLRB has [...]

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  This is a post simply suggesting we ponder what it means to live in a conflicted, grey world. Yeah, I hate that. It would be nice if everything was clear cut. But, it isn’t. Especially for people who are trying to survive in a corrupt economic system.   On the one hand, I am [...]

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   We can wait until the next inevitable capitulation–anyone want to take bets on the Bush tax cut expiration deal?–or we can keep debating about what has already, predictably, happened. We can complain about the Tea Party, FOX News etc–but I confess to being bored by that discussion simply because, get over it, they are [...]

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    We are wasting our breathe.  The president, and, respectfully, a significant number of Democrats, long ago signaled that they were going to choose a horrendous path for the country by embracingthe phony debt and deficit "crisis". We are here, on a day of complete capitulation, because of a very long march–years in the making–of [...]

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   The hammer that Verizon is seeking to bring down on its unionized workers is an important story–and the importance is being sorely missed, or at least, buried in everything I have read so far. It’s a story that typifies the broad class warfare underway in America: warfare that is happening largely because corporate executives [...]

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    The anger against the president that has been rocketing around many circles of liberal/progressive politics is misplaced.     The crisis we face isn’t about what the president is doing, or failing to do.     We are under siege, fighting the greatest class warfare in perhaps 100 years. And we can expect very [...]

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    Why some people are surprised that the economy continues to be weak speaks more to the bankruptcy of our elected leaders and the cluelessness of the press release transcribers (we used to call them "journalists"). People don’t have money–and that is a real issue when two-thirds of the economy depends on people buying stuff. [...]

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    It’s a head-scratcher–to some. Wealth has been created globally but, somehow, a suffocating blanket of austerity is embracing the world. But it would be no surprise to the people in the streets in Greece or to the millions of people here who cannot find work to read the headline in the left-wing, socialist rag…Financial [...]

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    Scott Walker is bringing his anti middle-class, union-busting act to New York City–and we can show him, on behalf of all Wisconsin workers and workers throughout the nation, that he is not welcome in New York City.  Walker is the featured speaker at a fundraiser for the Republican National Committee at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel–which [...]

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