Working Life

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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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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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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I found today’s cover story about living wage campaigns in The New York Times Sunday Magazine troubling mainly because of what it didn’t say. There was not a single–not one–mention that the reason people are living in poverty and have to survive on minimum wage salaries is because of the lack of unions. Duh. The […]

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It never ceases to amaze me to watch the conventional wisdom both forget the past and ignore the reality of what the economy means to real people. So, the mainstream media–from The New York Times to the Wall Street Journal–are all ecstatic about the Dow going over the 11,000 mark yesterday for the first time […]

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Last week, I speculated that the decision by IBM to stop providing its employees with a defined benefit pension plan was perhaps a sign that the end was near for real pensions. After all, IBM is not an ailing company and has the third-largest pension plan in America. Today, Mary Williams Walsh has a front–page […]

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Readers of this blog know that that I’ve spent a lot of time exploring the attack on pensions. Now, comes one of ths most ominous signals that corporate America is on a relentless path to end the concept of real pensions for workers: IBM announced yesterday that, beginning in 2008, it would freeze pension benefits […]

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Well, Happy New Year to all. Hope you’re all now properly chained back to your desks doing the bidding of the bosses… Right after the transit strike, we had a pretty intense back and forth about immigration policy and health care, set off by my post that the transit workers deal (which is causing a […]

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