Working Life

Today is Human Right Day. This morning, I paused to think about the soaring notion of human rights and, at the same time, the many challenges we face to achieve human rights.   Here is the preamble to the 1948 United Nation Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of […]

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A note to the British: you should thank your lucky stars that the Republicans are not running the Congress because fish and chips would now be renamed Freemarket Delight to protest your government’s decision to levy a tax on bankers’ bonuses. Seriously, here is one small step forward to a rationale response to the obscene […]

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   Over to Copenhagen (A lovely city to visit): how exactly do we adjust the global economy to save the planet from catastrophic changes AND do so in a way that is fair to workers. The process is called "Just Transition". The international labor movement–there is a delegation in Copenhagen drawing from labor around the […]

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   Free speech rights…for corporations: Montana voters, fed up with the grip of out-of-state mining interests on local politicians, passed an initiative in 1912 banning corporate spending on candidates for state office. As soon as Tuesday, that law — and similar ones in nearly half the states — could be struck down by the U.S. […]

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   An interesting report came into my email box this morning from the good folks at the International Labor Organization. The World of Work Report is an annual study by the ILO Institute, which provides an assessment of the current state of labour markets. Among its findings:   Based on the latest IMF growth estimates, […]

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   In one sense, this is a good thing: In the strongest employment report since the recession began nearly two years ago, the government said Friday that the nation’s employers had all but stopped shedding jobs in November, taking some of the pressure off of President Obama to come up with a wide-ranging jobs creation […]

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Diaz isn’t a bigot @Markos! Didn’t u know some of his best friends & relatives are gay? He <3’s the gays just not enough 2 give ’em = rights    gay marriage fails In NY? I expect this in Alabama but NY? So much 4 our northeast gay liberal elitist secular culture war   Monserrate […]

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   Today is not a happy day for those of us who believe strongly in marriage equality. The New York State Senate defeated marriage equality yesterday. Shame on those who stood in the doorway of justice–in the same way that Bull Connor stood in the doorway of justice during another struggle decades ago.    I […]

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   The president, having just announced that we would be wasting tens of billions of dollars more in a pointless, tragic, immoral war in Afghanistan, will hold a job summit tomorrow. It is a very small point but telling that we would first be told that vital resources will be spent in a conflict that […]

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This is the truth about the economy–not the truth embodied in the "green shoots" that various people are trying to look for. The truth of the real lives of real people: two jobs just doesn’t make enough work to survive. Actually, it’s plenty of work–way more work–than a single individual should have to do. But, […]

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