Working Life

Shop, shop, shop–but don’t forget some of the underside of the mad dash through the holidays–this from our friends at the National Labor Committee: The Dirty Little Secret behind the flashy, best-selling Bratz dolls: Bratz dolls are all the rage, ranking as the most sought-after toy this holiday season, surpassing even Barbie, which has dropped […]

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I admit to having this fascination with the huge bonuses being doled out to Wall Street executives. Each day brings a new record. And it rings so Marie Antionette–48 million people without health care, pensions disappearing, wage growth puny if at all…and, in the face of all that, a few folks are just piling up […]

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What a great country we have: a few people at Goldman Sachs are going to divvy up $16 billion, while the people that make it possible for the bankers and dealmakers to make off like bandits won’t have a decent pension to retire on. I’m talking about public employees—you know, the people who pick up […]

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Check out this sentence in today’s Wall Street Journal: “But the transformation has also wiped out much of a cradle-to-grave safety net — health care, education, pensions — that ensured basic needs were met for most of the population. It has severely damaged large parts of the country’s environment, and triggered a widening gap between […]

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The Wall StreeT Journal was reporting in yesterday’s edition that the Steelworkers and Goodyear Tire would be restarting negotiations tomorrow to try to end a 10-week old strike. I’ll post picture, if anyone has any, of the demos that took place around the country at Goodyear stores. Here’s the press release from the Steelworkers which […]

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What a day it was for Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union. First, Roger Toussaint, the president of the union who lead the local out on strike last December, was re-elected after a very bitter campaign. Toussaint apparently received under 50 percent but because he was running against four other opponents, he easily won […]

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Lo and behold, I just get finished writing about the phony promise of education as our economic salvation and, down from the mountaintop, drops a new report from—get this cool name—New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. I guess by putting “new” in the title the Commission was hoping to pull one over […]

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As a New York City taxpayer, I want a refund from Goldman Sachs. And you deserve one, too, before the company cuts checks to shower $16 billion in bonuses throughout its executive suites. We are all paying for the enrichment of the investment bankers and rainmakers who are going to pocket tens of millions of […]

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Over and over again, the people of our country hear that the solution to inadequate wages, disappearing heath care, vanishing pensions, and staggering personal debt is quite simple: get educated. It may sound right but it’s utterly phony. Hardly a day goes by when politicians or pundits don’t slip in a plug for a “smarter” […]

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I was just lamenting the other day that, too often, there are not young people–I maintain we are all young but I’m talking people south of their early 20s–involved in the labor movement. But, here you go, something to point out as a positive, if perhaps isolated, exception to the rule. Meat-packing firm is target […]

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