Working Life

Just a quick update on the negotiations between the stagehands’ union, IATSE Local 1, and Broadway’s producers – the two sides may be close to an agreement. One of the big issues here has been the work rules changes that the League of American Theatres and Producers is seeking. Today’s NY Daily News has this: […]

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  When you slip on your Victoria Secret garb, remember this: it comes to you partly due to the wonders of so-called "free trade." And, in particular, that little Victoria Secret garment (I guess "little" is redundant in this context) may even hail from Jordan–which was supposed to be the poster child for how one […]

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   I’d guess most people now believe, five weeks into a strike by the Writers Guild of America, that Big Media is greedy and that it should agree to share money with film and television writers when shows are downloaded over the Internet. We take Big Media’s greed for granted. But, here’s an even bigger […]

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    As you continue to digest your Thanksgiving meals, remember that there are the fortunate and the unfortunate. In America, that means that the fortunate are the CEOS of Wall Street and the unfortunate are housing tenants who are losing their homes thanks to the greed of the very CEOS on Wall Street.     First, […]

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    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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