Working Life

   When you think about having a job, the logical person would consider that a situation where you were making enough money to pay your bills, and maybe save a bit. Anything less is not real employment. And by that measure, our unemployment figure is more than 15 percent.    So, each month, the media […]

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   I’m not sure that anyone has told NY Comptroller Bill Thompson yet but his race for mayor is over…effectively. His only prayer (and any other candidate’s only prayer) to defeat the billionaire mayor was to have a unified labor movement behind him. It was the only way–and even that was a big "if"–to balance […]

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This is not a post about the auto industry. The attack against the decent standard of living fought for and won by auto workers over many generations is just one of the most visible assaults on the American Dream–an assault that is sweeping through every corner of the economy as workers have to pay for […]

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   Those poor AIG executives–they must be pissed about getting all the heat from walking away with a paltry $165 million in bonuses while the folks at Merrill Lynch managed to cart away twenty times that amount just as the government was crafting its takeover by Bank of America.    Remember, Merrill had just posted […]

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   The Wall Street Journal has a story today looking at what a modern depression would look like. The story asserts: There is no consensus definition for "depression." Harvard University economist Robert Barro defines it as a decline in per-person economic output or consumption of more than 10%, and puts the odds of a depression […]

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   I meant to write about this yesterday mainly because I knew most of the readers of this blog would want to know that their stock options they get at the companies they work for are worth a bit more or at least have the potential to earn a lot more money despite the crash […]

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   While we are distracted by the minor problem of the financial crisis, and shoveling mountains of cash into the hands of private investors who will enrich themselves (again), there is the small matter of the so-called "free trade" deal with Panama that keeps poking its nose above ground. There are murmurings that there will […]

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   Yesterday, Arlen Specter declared on the floor of the Senate that he would not vote for cloture–meaning, for you’all not as familiar with the lingo of the Senate, that he would not vote to end a filibuster, which requires 60 votes to stop–on the Employee Free Choice Act. Oddly, this got very little play […]

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   I was inclined to give my own take on the newest Treasury plan to bail out banks but, not that that isn’t important, I thought this was more likely to get missed. Surprise, surprise, Wal-Mart is negotiating with the UFCW about an organizing issue. But, it isn’t what you think: Nine years after a […]

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   Two things caught my eye this morning. Item #1: If you want to know how the power has shifted in the world of banking, The Financial Times has a fascinating full-page story entitled "The fearsome become the fallen". It compares the rankings of the leading banks in 1999 to the rankings right now, as […]

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