Working Life

It is still very grim out there for those people who want decent paying work. Not just a job–but a job that pays a fair wage. Today’s numbers make even more clear–we need a Job Party.   I’ll talk about the Job Party a bit more. But, first, let’s look at the numbers: While the […]

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   Ok, fine, this is a good thing, via The Wall St. Journal: The number of U.S. workers filing new claims for jobless benefits slid last week to the lowest level in nearly two and a half years, indicating that labor-market conditions continue to improve. Initial unemployment claims declined by 34,000 to 388,000 in the […]

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   All that clamoring for jobs. Feh. Complain, complain. The Republican family values crowd will soon be promoting this: Why don’t you just move in with your parents, like a lot of other stressed-out Americans, and then we can give out even more tax cuts for the wealthy: Of the myriad ways the Great Recession […]

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Putting aside the larger argument for the moment about whether we–the taxpayers–should have stepped into to save failing institutions, it is pretty clear now that what we also did was just give a nice new revenue stream for banks that did not need the money but figured, heck, why not get our taste from the […]

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   I’ve never been sold on the notion of education as the saving grace of this unholy economic system. The problem in the country–and the world–is not that people are not smart enough or that they need to go to college. It’s that we have a system that drives down wages no matter how smart […]

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   Let’s face it. Companies don’t care about you anymore: Despite a surge this year in short-term hiring, many American businesses are still skittish about making those jobs permanent, raising concerns among workers and some labor experts that temporary employees will become a larger, more entrenched part of the work force. This is bad news […]

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   We weren’t invited to the CEO summit with the president (you missed chicken and fish for lunch, by the way). But, I think there is a huge point being missed: The White House has been pursuing a charm offensive with the biggest U.S. employers in recent weeks, hoping to convince them to plow some […]

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   I am continually amazed at the way people–or at least the brain-dead traditional media–express surprise when this happens: In the one-two punch many had long been fearing, hiring by businesses has slowed significantly while government jobs are disappearing at a record pace. Companies added 64,000 jobs last month, after having added 93,000 jobs in […]

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The madness in the world can best be boiled down to this: at the same time that we are told there is not enough money to create jobs or pay for real health care, our government is fueling an even more aggressive weapons spree around the world–and that spree, while it will mean robust new […]

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I have always thought there is a huge gap between economists and numbers’ crunchers versus the reality-based world of workers. But, in the midst of the current economic crisis, it seems to me that the entire way we talk about "recessions" needs to be thrown out the window. It simply does not measure, and obscures, […]

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