Working Life

Solidarity is one of the bedrock principles of the labor movement. It has a pretty sound strategic and tactical basis: you can’t win if your ranks are divided. I don’t mean that you can’t have debate. I mean that we have to support certain general principles. Here is an example: public employees are not to […]

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They robbed Americans of their future. They cost perhaps a generation of hard-working people a decent pay check. And they left millions of people with empty 401(k)s, with some seniors being booted from their retirement homes because there was no money left. And, yet, they still don’t get it–or maybe they truly don’t care.   […]

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   Let’s review a couple of facts. Over the past 30 years, even though productivity has been skyrocketing, wages have been essentially flat for workers. And we are now living through a period where at least one in five Americans does not have full-time work with decent wages.    But, at least some people are […]

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   The president is going to announce today a tax on the big banks and financial institutions: The tax on banks, insurance companies and brokerages with more than $50 billion in assets would start after June 30 and seek to collect $90 billion over 10 years, according to a senior administration official who briefed reporters […]

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   It’s a strange coincidence but there is a direct connection between the earthquake in Haiti and the spectacle of the financial elite testifying  before the Commission-that-will-do-nothing about the mess they made.    How did we get to where we are? We have lived in a system that allowed a tiny elite to rob the […]

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   Bankers are nervous about the bonuses they are about to get: Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and other big banks are bracing for a renewed public and political backlash against their compensation plans as they prepare to unveil multi-billion dollar bonus packages. Under pressure from government, banks are already saying they will devote the […]

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   Merit is one of the enduring standards we are all taught from the moment we start school. If you get good grades, you advance. If you perform well, you advance. What, then, are we supposed to think about the young children or college-age students who read about this, courtesy of The Times Gretchen Morgenson […]

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One of the biggest challenges that we face as a country is not that we lack money or wealth–we have plenty of money. Rather, we have a distorted set of priorities and an ideological frame that walls off many possibilities to create a decent society. For example: the belief in the so-called "free market" that […]

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   There is a poll out today that shows the fortune of the Democratic Party sliding dramatically. I am not a big believer that polls tell you much beyond a monetary snapshot–and we know how quickly those polls can change. But, this was the more interesting–and worrisome, from the party’s point of view: Julie Edwards, […]

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   I am not shocked in the least by this story: Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers paid their executives largely in stock, and that stock lost most or all of its value when those companies collapsed. Many people on Wall Street say these examples help make the case that pay incentives were not what caused […]

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