Working Life

I was going to write something else about the foolishness of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) but, hey, WikiLeaks beat me to it. This dumbness on the part of the Democratic Party to wrap their arms around so-called “free trade”, stretching all the way back to Bill Clinton and his (and, I know people want to conveniently forget, ROBERT REICH’S) passionate embrace of NAFTA, is the sad gift that keeps giving. And, now, another Democrat is happy to walk all over the environment to achieve…what? More stupid trade policy.

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   For all of those people who criticize empire and for those out there who correctly worry about the unequal distribution of economic power, come close and absorb another truth: the obsession around keeping the dollar high is not healthy. In fact, a lower dollar would be better for most of us–and for the environment… […]

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   We’re back to a familiar problem–and that’s partly a result of the lack of leadership in the country on the issue of jobs. The jobs crisis is so acute and people feel that political leaders aren’t responding so we get this: The Obama administration’s environmental agenda, long a target of American business, is beginning […]

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Here we are living at a time of the greatest class warfare in at least half a century. It is almost impossible to form a union legally in the U.S.–corporations have all power in the workplace. We have the greatest divide between rich and poor in 100 years. And now comes some clear evidence of […]

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   There has been a lot of debate when it comes to the question of "green jobs"–what exactly is a "green job"? And when some people call for "high paying, good jobs" in the new "green" industries, does that also mean those jobs are UNION jobs?    A little taste of the question comes from […]

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  I keep thinking that there will be a limit on how far thinking people will go to turn a blind eye to the death and misery brought to us courtesy of so-called "free trade". But, lo and behold, every day brings new wonders at the capacity of our government, and its servants in the […]

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    I’ll be writing a lot more in the future about the links between labor and the environment. Here’s a development that I’ve been following for some time. The Teamsters have had a long-term project to organize drivers in the ports, particularly on the West Coast–there are thousands of drivers who could potentially be Teamsters […]

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Yesterday’s New York Times has a piece on the environmental cost of economic growth in China titled As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Extremes. The long, detailed piece focuses on the huge impact heavy industry has had on public health in China and the lack of government action or effective regulations to address these problems. […]

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