Working Life

    Like most of you’all, I’m preparing to go off and stuff my face with way too much food, pies and alcohol–maybe the one advantage I have is that I don’t have to do all this in the usual dysfunctional family settings…my good friend Laura Flanders is packing her place with a wild pack of […]

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Forget what the pundits and some of the elements of the Democratic corporate establishment think: John Edwards is reflecting the sentiment of Iowans when he points out the dangerous effects of globalization.   Today’s Wall Street Journal tells us this: At a John Deere plant here, bright green tractors bound for Brazil, Russia and China […]

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    I’m running to the WGA picket line here and have a whole bunch of things on my mind to write about but this will do for now, from today’s Wall Street Journal: A collision with a semi-trailer truck seven years ago left 52-year-old Deborah Shank permanently brain-damaged and in a wheelchair. Her husband, Jim, […]

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   What would it be like to have a president who actually believes in strikes? Who believes in the rights of workers? Who also understands the danger of media consolidation? That was what became more clear to me watching a video of John Edwards marching on the picket line with striking Writers Guild of America […]

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Dear Sandra, I don’t mean to rub it in, but I bet you’re wishing you had paid attention to that open letter I wrote you a few years ago. This week, a report on channel KPNX leaked that your Alzheimer’s-stricken husband John is living, happily, with a new girlfriend in an old age home. Their […]

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    Yesterday, I riffed on the issue I had with Barack Obama’s comments about Social Security and, generally, about the impulse of too many Democrats to buy the framework that there is some "crisis" in Social Security. Today, Paul Krugman picks up the case (I would say that Krugman was copying my post but really […]

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I gagged on this during the infamous Tim Russert interview with Barack Obama but shrugged my shoulders in despair. But, I shouldn’t have. When Barack Obama repeated the Republican/Wall Street line about the crisis in Social Security, he was dead wrong. And he and other Democrats have got to stop mouthing this frame.    Here […]

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    This was interesting. Yesterday, the AFL-CIO and UFCW issued a joint press release about a victory in a long battle: the Occupational Safety and Health Administration will finally require–drumroll, please-employers to pay for safety-related materials like goggles, fire-resistant clothing, face shields, hard hats and other safety equipment. Only in America–or other societies where workers […]

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   So, since I’ve been updating folks on the Writers Guild of America strike against Big Media, a number of people have written me or commented: what can we do to help if we are not WGA members and/or don’t live in Los Angeles or New York City? Other than console you for having to […]

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    At first blush, when I saw today’s front-page headline in The New York Times entitled "A Health Plan For Wal-Mart: Less Stinginess",  thought…hmmm…what’s up here? The upshot of the story: The company, according to data available for the first time, is offering better coverage to a greater number of workers. Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest […]

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