Working Life

I mean, c’mon–is there no shame? Yes, that’s rhetorical. We have the greatest jobs crisis in decades, with close to one in five Americans not able to find decent, full-time paying work. The minimum wage is a poverty-level wage. But, all is well on Wall Street–as in $144 BILLION in pay.   This just up […]

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   I recently wrote about the revolt against poverty wages around the world. Some good news–which is so rare in international labor work–via our friends from the National Labor Committee: Mr. Montu Ghosh, an important progressive trade union leader and lawyer in Bangladesh was released an hour ago on bail, after having spent 73 days […]

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   I am continually amazed at the way people–or at least the brain-dead traditional media–express surprise when this happens: In the one-two punch many had long been fearing, hiring by businesses has slowed significantly while government jobs are disappearing at a record pace. Companies added 64,000 jobs last month, after having added 93,000 jobs in […]

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 Sure, elections do matter, at some level–it is no coincidence that, in the wake of Citizens United, a torrent of corporate money is flowing to mostly Republican candidates. But, the truth is that, whatever the results of the elections, we will not end up with a government willing to stop the global movement of jobs […]

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     This caught my eye: More than 20 years ago, congressional Democrats pushed for an increase in the minimum wage, only to have the first President Bush veto the legislation. There were fights over the minimum wage again during Bill Clinton’s presidency, and more battles under George W. Bush. Now, Democrats are once again […]

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   Nobody noticed that this past Friday was the first official day the Laborers were back in the AFL-CIO. I tweeted it and posted the fact on Facebook (I’ve not quite gotten back to blogging here full-time again but hope to do so soon). Which made me think: when will Change To Win officially fold? […]

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The madness in the world can best be boiled down to this: at the same time that we are told there is not enough money to create jobs or pay for real health care, our government is fueling an even more aggressive weapons spree around the world–and that spree, while it will mean robust new […]

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I have always thought there is a huge gap between economists and numbers’ crunchers versus the reality-based world of workers. But, in the midst of the current economic crisis, it seems to me that the entire way we talk about "recessions" needs to be thrown out the window. It simply does not measure, and obscures, […]

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Yesterday, I wrote about how the decline of U.S. wages has made workers here cheaper to hire than workers in India, at least in the call center industry. Today, the news hails from Asia where workers are rising up against poverty-level wages.   From the Financial Times (and, as a side observation, the FT gives […]

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Along the road of the past 30 years, productivity has been soaring (and technology has been a minor part of that) while wages have been flat–thanks to de-unionization and a simple corporate decision to cut wages even when profitable. And, despite that assault on wages, the main line of concern was over outsourcing–that is, jobs […]

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