Working Life

Here is something we can all agree on I think—drug companies are blood-sucking, greedy cheats who cannot be trusted with the health and welfare of tens of millions of people. Am I right? And that’s even more true as we watch the global scramble to be the first company to profit big-time from a vaccine […]

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 Let’s go really big! I outline a $6.5 trillion stimulus—more than double what the Democrats in the House passed—because that’s what the people need over the next year: $1.3 trillion in wage guarantees; $715 billion for state and local governments; $600 billion for a “Pandemic Medicare For All”; $1.5 trillion to cancel all student […]

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Private equity vultures love a great economic crisis. Circling above their wounded corporate prey, they wait until a company is too weak to survive, and, then, swoop in to pick up the pieces at a bargain price—which usually involves cutting thousands of jobs, too. And, now, a new rule will allow private equity firms to […]

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I pull back the lens a bit on the Black Lives Matter movement to consider how the uprising is touching the consciousness of workers around the globe, especially in Africa. Chris Johnson, the regional director of Africa for the Solidarity Center, joins me in a conversation about the close relationship between racism and economic oppression, […]

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 The big news—it’s the first regularly scheduled Working Life TV Show!!! View the show now and sign up at www.youtube.com/WorkingLifeWithJonathanTasini  But, all our audio podcast listeners will still be able to hear the show in the long-time format. The unemployment system is in chaos—jammed phone lines, crashing websites. People can’t get the checks they […]

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 If I say that drug companies are sleazy leeches whose CEOs make millions of dollars while basically killing thousands of people who can’t afford outrageous drug prices, you’d shrug your shoulders and say, “yeah, well, duh.” Drug companies make these huge profits largely because of an absolutely insane system of patents, which you could […]

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Calling people “gig” workers is a subtle trap. “Gig” can sound anywhere from upbeat to just a mundane description. The truth is the “gig” economy is just another way of exploiting people and it’s a dream for all capitalists to have a pool of workers who can be used and abused at the beckon call […]

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Here’s a no brainer observation: It would be hard to find any areas of agreement between the AFL-CIO and Goldman Sachs. Well, I got one—it turns out that the AFL-CIO and Goldman Sachs, along with scores of heads of states, labor folks and business titans, are on the same page about one idea which hasn’t […]

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It is quite something to hear the elites in Washington—especially Republican members of Congress and the menace in the White House—blather on about wanting to wait to see how well the previous, inadequate fiscal stimulus works before deciding whether to do anything else. That’s while tens of millions of people are in the streets, huge […]

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There is no way to downplay the risks to U.S. frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic—and I’ve dug into that in the past month or so, in our various segments talking about workers in health care, postal service, hog and poultry processing, airlines, rail, and subways. It’s dangerous and frightening—and it’s exponentially more terrifying when […]

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