Working Life

The elites are gathering for the annual global conference in Davos, Switzerland. And, today, there’s a little snippet at the Wall Street Journal’s on-line edition (subscription required) that fits with what I’ve been saying for many months: “A gloomy forecast about the world economy greeted the leaders when Stephen S. Roach, chief economist of Morgan […]

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I’ve just finished reading some of the the coverage by the mainstream major media of the jobs cuts at Ford and, really, it’s pathetic. Being out here on the West Coast (my excuse for a post at this late hour for you Easterners), I started with the Los Angeles Times, migrated over to The New […]

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I’m here in Los Angeles (no, not sunning myself at the beach) and caught a disturbing article in The Los Angeles Times by one of its columnists, Steve Lopez. The piece was entitled “Deals So Sweet They’ll Kill Us: Worried about your 401(k) tanking in your golden years? You should become a cop.” The upshot […]

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Nothing seems to agitate The New York Times more than the idea that people in the world are prepared to reject the neo-liberal economic model that is devastating the livelihoods of workers throughout the world. In today’s article about the ascent of the new Bolivian president, Evo Morales, The Times frets: TIWANAKU, Bolivia, Jan. 21 […]

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I’ve been a skeptic for many months–actually, it might be years now–about the declarations about economic “recoveries.” And I also have been regularly raising that a deep economic crisis is around the corner. For many people, it’s already here. The recently release data from the government tells us why people are anxious about the future–and […]

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I was going to post, quite late today, about a picket line I took part in this early morning against Rep. Gregory Meeks (he’s one of the CAFTA 15) at JFK airport. But, hey, we’ve got the transit workers rejecting the negotiated contract. Here’s what New York 1 is reporting: Transport Workers Union members have […]

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I suspect this is going to cause a big hoo-hah in labor so let’s have a discussion here, too. Two large unions, SEIU and the Laborers, have joined with the Chamber of Commerce to push for an immigration bill that would “legalize millions of illegal workers,” as reported today in The New York Times. One […]

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Henry Cuellar was one of the CAFTA 15–the so-called Democrats who abandoned working people when he voted for CAFTA. Now, he’s getting a big kiss from the Club For Growth, the conservative political action committee that runs hard-right Republicans against its own (the club’s president, former Rep. Pat Toomey, found Arlen Specter to be so […]

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You think I’d be used to it. But, I never lose my sense of shock and amazement at how brazen corporate executives can be in this country. You may remember that United Airlines filed for bankruptcy, partly to dump its workers’ pension plans. And the workers themselves have made about $4 billion in concessions. Today, […]

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In the past few days, I’ve read a couple of things that, on the face of it, don’t have a direct connection–but they do. First, Jared Bernstein at the Economic Policy Institute tells us in a “snapshot” that “Wage growth slows for most workers between 2000 and 2005: One of the most important problems in […]

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