Working Life

   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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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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I think it is always useful to see the threads connecting what might seem to be things that happen independently. The big picture is this: we live in a dysfunctional economic system which has created the greatest divide between rich and poor in a hundred years–and that is a global point. Here, for your consideration, […]

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   It is not surprising, given an astonishing level of underemployment, that we learn this: The number of Americans who lived in households that lacked consistent access to adequate food soared last year, to 49 million, the highest since the government began tracking what it calls “food insecurity” 14 years ago, the Department of Agriculture […]

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   The unemployment numbers are out–and we have the worst picture for jobs in quite a long time: For Americans who wake up each morning thinking about their job hunt, Friday’s unemployment report offered little reassurance that their search would soon pay off, even as the broader economy showed signs of strengthening. The United States […]

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   I believe that we can fix the economy–but it will take a focused and entirely different approach. For a long time, I’ve maintained that the government statistics on economic growth often don’t match the reality regular people face. Today, we learn: Spending by Americans took a big tumble in September, as they lost a […]

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   If you read this blog regularly, you know that I have been a skeptic about the talk about the "green shoots" in the economy–the signs that somehow the economy is getting "better". I based most of my skeptical argument about the "green shoots" on a simple fact: until working people see that they have […]

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   Readers here know that I have urged us, for a long time, to be quite careful about the talk of "recovery". I do not put much faith in a rising Dow since that is, in my opinion, mainly a game of a bunch of traders trying to jump in and out of short-term profit-taking. […]

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   Bob Herbert asks the right question today: The big question on the domestic front right now is whether President Obama understands the gravity of the employment crisis facing the country. Does he get it? The signals coming out of the White House have not been encouraging. The Beltway crowd and the Einsteins of high […]

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We don’t talk about poverty in our country. Our political discourse, guided by pollsters and consultants, directs leaders to refer to "the middle-class", not to the millions of people who live in conditions that do not get much better, whether we are in something called a "recession" or we are in "recovery". And it is […]

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