Working Life

   An interesting report came into my email box this morning from the good folks at the International Labor Organization. The World of Work Report is an annual study by the ILO Institute, which provides an assessment of the current state of labour markets. Among its findings:   Based on the latest IMF growth estimates, […]

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   In one sense, this is a good thing: In the strongest employment report since the recession began nearly two years ago, the government said Friday that the nation’s employers had all but stopped shedding jobs in November, taking some of the pressure off of President Obama to come up with a wide-ranging jobs creation […]

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Diaz isn’t a bigot @Markos! Didn’t u know some of his best friends & relatives are gay? He <3’s the gays just not enough 2 give ’em = rights    gay marriage fails In NY? I expect this in Alabama but NY? So much 4 our northeast gay liberal elitist secular culture war   Monserrate […]

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   Today is not a happy day for those of us who believe strongly in marriage equality. The New York State Senate defeated marriage equality yesterday. Shame on those who stood in the doorway of justice–in the same way that Bull Connor stood in the doorway of justice during another struggle decades ago.    I […]

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   The president, having just announced that we would be wasting tens of billions of dollars more in a pointless, tragic, immoral war in Afghanistan, will hold a job summit tomorrow. It is a very small point but telling that we would first be told that vital resources will be spent in a conflict that […]

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This is the truth about the economy–not the truth embodied in the "green shoots" that various people are trying to look for. The truth of the real lives of real people: two jobs just doesn’t make enough work to survive. Actually, it’s plenty of work–way more work–than a single individual should have to do. But, […]

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I think it is always useful to see the threads connecting what might seem to be things that happen independently. The big picture is this: we live in a dysfunctional economic system which has created the greatest divide between rich and poor in a hundred years–and that is a global point. Here, for your consideration, […]

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   The deficit hawks are on the march–and this is a bi-partisan din. And it is basically nonsense designed to open the door to some very draconian cuts in our basic social safety net. Here is Dean Baker: Relative to the size of the economy, the deficits that we are running are large and the […]

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   Whew…ten years sure goes by quickly. A decade ago, labor led, along with environmentalists and other civic-minded groups, a challenge to the framework of so-called "free trade" in the streets of Seattle. A few days ago, I wondered why a Democratic president would be on a path to push through a so-called "free trade" […]

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   I am not shocked in the least by this story: Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers paid their executives largely in stock, and that stock lost most or all of its value when those companies collapsed. Many people on Wall Street say these examples help make the case that pay incentives were not what caused […]

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