Working Life

   I’m as critical of the Democratic Party has anyone. But, we need to keep in mind that, on a daily basis, it can matter somewhat, at the margins, who is in charge. This would never happen under Republican rule: The National Labor Relations Board announced on Friday that it planned to sue Arizona, South […]

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   A lot of pain is going to continue to wash across the country. Witness this info on the continued lag in the construction industry: Construction is a big employer and one of the better-paid sectors for men who lack a college degree. The sector has shed 2.1 million jobs from its peak in March […]

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The danger in a blip of good news is that it’s simply that: a blip. It is certainly a good thing that the data shows that 162,000 jobs were added in March. But, the truth is that this is not much to celebrate. And it actually should be a siren to move dramatically to embrace […]

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   Bob Herbert makes a point that I’ve been making repeatedly for many, many months: Those who think some kind of robust recovery is hiding around the corner, just waiting to spring a pleasant surprise on us, are deluded. Too many families and individuals are tapped out. They’re struggling from week to week and month […]

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   The healthcare bill is a mess–it won’t cover all Americans at affordable costs and it will hand insurance companies tens of billions of dollars in new profits, the hard-earned wages of working people who are already stressed out financially.    The only ray of light down the road to fix this, if you just […]

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   This is how fragile–and foolish–the talk of recovery is. Yesterday, you may recall that I pointed out the record level of personal bankruptcies recorded in 2009–at the same time that some "analysts" were heralding a recovery based on some uptick in manufacturing (one would venture to guess that those same "analysts" were among those […]

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