Working Life

Private equity vultures love a great economic crisis. Circling above their wounded corporate prey, they wait until a company is too weak to survive, and, then, swoop in to pick up the pieces at a bargain price—which usually involves cutting thousands of jobs, too. And, now, a new rule will allow private equity firms to […]

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Wait, didn’t we just talk last week about the attacks on government workers? Well, a week doesn’t go by when another attack against people, who keep our society working, isn’t launched by this administration—this time it’s the workers at the Environmental Protection Agency. AFGE Local 1236 Bethany Dreyfus joins me to give us the lowdown […]

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If you look hard enough, you can find conspiracies to defraud workers in every corner of the economy—and those conspiracies are usually dressed up as something entirely different. Take the people who work for the VA—there is a conspiracy to crush their union and cut wages, all dressed by in the cloak of “efficiency through […]

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Yesterday was Equal Pay Day—not a celebratory day but a time, again, to raise a stink that there is still a significant pay gap between men and women in our country: on average in 2018, women were paid 22.6 percent less than men. I talk more about gender pay discrimination with economist Elise Gould. I, […]

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All those flag-waving politicians love their military folks—until it’s time to screw them every which way once they take off the uniform, especially when it comes to funding the Veterans Administration. I look into the attack on the VA by the free-market fanatics in a conversation with union policy expert Jacque Simon. I also chat […]

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Betsy Devos has already shown herself to be entirely unqualified to be running the Department of Education. I add on to what we already know with a look at how she is breaking the law by trying to impose rules on workers in the department without bothering to reach agreement with the union representing the […]

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   As we shuffle–or maybe that’s scuffle–into the weekend, a small ray of good news: The government will grant collective bargaining rights to the nation’s 40,000 airport screeners, the head of the largest federal workers union said Friday. John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, told the Associated Press he was informed […]

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    This kind of slipped under the radar screen–but it’s a small sign that makes me skeptical that the Employee Free Choice Act will ever pass. In a small brief, The New York Times reported an Associated Press story that said: Democratic leaders in Congress said they had dropped their demand for union bargaining rights […]

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