Working Life

There is no recovery for Main Street, no matter how many people are on their knees looking for "green shoots". It is phony rhetoric–and even the left-wing Financial Times grasps the problem.   The paper’s front-page article today is headlined "Goldman and Citi highlight divide", with the article’s subhead reading, "Wall Street recovering faster than […]

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    If you are wondering whether the culture of greed on Wall Street–a culture that led to the cratering of the economy just a year ago and the loss of millions of jobs for regular Americans–I present to you news about Goldman Sachs, which will quickly remind us that very little is changing.   Things […]

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   I don’t have much to add on the extremely disappointing and inadequate health care bill that passed the Senate yesterday–it’s been said by others–so I turned my attention to a couple of international developments.    Every so often, when I discuss trade, here or in debates elsewhere, people say: well, we live in a […]

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   Readers here know that I have urged us, for a long time, to be quite careful about the talk of "recovery". I do not put much faith in a rising Dow since that is, in my opinion, mainly a game of a bunch of traders trying to jump in and out of short-term profit-taking. […]

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   The obsession with the value of the dollar is kind of goofy. More than three years ago, not for the first time, I suggested that it would actually be a good thing if the value of the dollar declined significantly, particularly as it relates to the trade relationship with China. People in political circles […]

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A controversy has erupted recently about whether Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is actually a Jew. Pundits and professors alike are divided over whether his original last name, which his family changed when he was 4, is exclusively Jewish. I attended Camp Havanagila, a Zionist summer camp in the Catskill Mountains, when I was young—and so, it […]

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   A battle that is a typical story of corporate greed: Stella D’oro closed its Bronx bakery a day ahead of schedule Thursday, officially putting its 136 unionized employees out of work. The plant’s general manager Dan Meyers summoned the workers for a 3 p.m. meeting as the first shift was ending, informed them that […]

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   It isn’t surprising that Republicans really don’t want to enforce the law but this is quite revealing: The New York State labor commissioner, President Obama’s nominee to be the Labor Department’s top enforcement official, won approval from a Senate committee Wednesday but immediately encountered a roadblock when the committee’s senior Republican said he would […]

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   Let’s start with a basic premise: anyone who tries to get what is happening in the economy by looking for "green shoots" or the "recovery" does not understand what is happening to real people. Almost one out of 5 Americans–ONE OUT OF FIVE–do not have decent, meaningful work. Forget the media reports about unemployment–as […]

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   Bob Herbert asks the right question today: The big question on the domestic front right now is whether President Obama understands the gravity of the employment crisis facing the country. Does he get it? The signals coming out of the White House have not been encouraging. The Beltway crowd and the Einsteins of high […]

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