Current viewpoints on workplace issues. Editorials, op-eds, political commentaries, columnists and more.
What's Obama Done for Workers in His First 100 Days? Plenty
Format: News Commentary
Source: Art Levine, Huffington Post
Date: April 29, 2009
While some in the labor movement are doubtless disappointed at the slow pace of the Employee Free Choice Act in moving through Congress, there are enough key figures in the administration, including Vice President Joe Biden and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, ensuring that the President keeps workers' priorities very much alive.
Format: Editorial
Source: Editorial, New York Times
Date: February 12, 2009
Most businesses try to compete by being efficient and smart. Some do it the nasty way. They undercut their competitors by hiring and exploiting low-wage workers. Recent years have been especially good for this repellent bottom-feeding thanks to weak and indifferent government enforcement of workers' rights and a darkening political climate against illegal immigrants -- the backbone of the cheap, disposable work force.
Format: Editorial
Source: Editorial, New York Times
Date: July 6, 2008
Judging from
the jobs report for June, released last Thursday, the economy has shifted into reverse. For the sixth month in
a row, the economy shed jobs, for a total loss of 438,000 jobs so far this year. About half of that came in the
past three months, the worst second-quarter showing since 2003, when the nation was mired in joblessness from
the previous recession. It appears that things will get worse before they get better.
A Grim Diagnosis for the U.S., and a Prescription
Source: Harry Hurt III, New York Times
Date: December 16, 2007
Every once in a blue moon, a book
comes along that seems to articulate my most deep-seated fears about the future of America, its economy and its
body politic. I do wish the best for my beloved country, but I see so many ominous signs at every turn: wars
seemingly without end or clear purpose; a widening income gap between the financial elite and middle-class
families who can no longer afford to own homes; the kowtowing of ambitious politicians in both major parties to
special-interest groups; the loss of respect for America around the world.
Medicare for all: the only sound solution to our healthcare crisis
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Guy T. Saperstein, AlterNet
Date: January 16, 2007
We all know that
America's healthcare system is collapsing. Andy Stern has written that America's employer-based health
insurance system is "dead." Auto executives troop to the White House complaining that they are not competitive
with foreign automakers because they pay $1,500 per car for health insurance. Politicians, even Republicans,
are offering solutions. Let's put the healthcare agenda on the "slippery slope" to Medicare for all, not work
toward more private insurance and inevitable healthcare system insolvency--where most current healthcare
proposals (including Democratic) are headed.
Opening the door to the executive suite
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Kenneth Arroyo Roldan, Gary M. Stern, Baltimore Sun
Date: October 16, 2006
When PepsiCo named Indra Nooyi its chief executive officer in August,
several articles extolled the company for hiring a female CEO. Ms. Nooyi's appointment was also newsworthy
because of the paucity of minorities who have been allowed into the executive suite. But most articles avoided
the bigger point: Why haven't more mid- to senior managers who are minorities been permitted into the
corridors of power? And more important, what needs to be done to expand the opportunities for women, Latinos
and African-Americans in corporate America?
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Cindy Zeldin, TomPaine.com
Date: October 16, 2006
In what seems to be an emerging annual ritual, an internal Wal-Mart memo detailing employee benefit cuts
recently surfaced. According to news reports, Wal-Mart plans to limit its 2007 health insurance options for new
hires to two choices, both high deductible plans, in an effort to squeeze benefit costs. While it isn't news
that Wal-Mart's benefits are skimpy--and Wal-Mart certainly isn't the only employer looking to trim its
health care costs--the mega-retailer's abandonment of traditional health insurance in favor of high-deductible
health insurance takes the benefits squeeze to a whole new level: it puts a dagger through the heart of the
very concept of insurance.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Robert L. Borosage, TomPaine.com
Date: October 16, 2006
Struggling with congressional scandals at home and catastrophic fiascos abroad, Republicans
have sensibly rolled out the old standard--"Democrats will raise your taxes." But as the old tune plays, it is
clear it doesn't have its old power to get people on their feet. The ad buys go up, but voters don't seem to
be listening any more. Perhaps that's because they've been mugged by reality. No wonder the old tax cut hymns
can't be heard over the working family blues. The tax cuts don't begin to pay for stagnant wages and rising
costs. Conservatives may find out this fall that it is time to update the hymnal.
Employee's death affects the workplace
Format: Advice Column
Source: Hap LeCrone, Pioneer Press
Date: June 30, 2006
I am the owner
and manager of a company that employs about 100 people. Recently, a longtime employee whom we all admired and
respected died suddenly. Can you please give suggestions on the best ways for me to handle the tragic loss of
this man? We are all in shock and pain.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Earl Hadley, TomPaine.com
Date: June 30, 2006
Politicians of all stripes talk about competing globally and the importance of higher education in preparing
the work-force of the 21st century. But words don't make this a reality; they don't put qualified students
into the classroom. The conservative majority's refusal to take basic steps like increasing the value of the
maximum Pell Grant demonstrates that they are abandoning not only middle- and working-class families fighting
for a college education, but their own promises about strengthening our economy. The Republican majority should
be banned from bemoaning the state of the American worker or college affordability. Their continual refusal to
help make college affordable makes them fully complicit in weakening both.
Democrats finally wake up to need for minimum wage hike
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Ralph Nader, CommonDreams
Date: June 24, 2006
Whatever led
to the metastasis of corporate demons inside the brain of the Democratic Party over the last thirty years, it
has paid off in the business establishment. The cost of freezing the minimum wage has deprived millions of
working Americans of trillions of dollars for their necessities of life. The abdication of the Congressional
Democrats, even when they were the majority and Clinton was President, on the living wage matter has cost them
as well. More than any other single issue, save possibly health insurance for all, their reluctance to boldly
and visibly champion the living wage has cost them the Presidential and Congressional elections. The issue is
getting hotter, though far from being visible to most Americans, including poor families.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Jared Bernstein, Ross Eisenbrey, TomPaine.com
Date: June 21, 2006
The House of Representatives was busy yesterday engaging in vicious class warfare against
working families. Their two signature accomplishments were striking the proposed increase in the minimum wage
from the Labor-HHS bill and reviving the effort to repeal the estate tax. It's hard to find words to express
the outrage of these actions. Instead of seeking ways to address and ameliorate the unbalanced growth which
characterizes this economy, they're exacerbating the problem. Instead of a small, overdue boost to low-wage
workers that would help them reconnect, just a bit, to the growing economy, they want to shovel even more of
the benefits of our prodigious productivity growth to the top of the wealth scale. Shame on all of us if we sit
back and watch it happen.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Jared Bernstein, TomPaine.com
Date: June 20, 2006
An
increase in the minimum wage is once again on the congressional agenda, as Democrats try to wedge it into
various bills while Republicans try to sink it. And once again, defenders and opponents are snapping into
action, dusting off briefs and arguments, updating the analysis for inflation and generally doing the same
dance we always do. There's got to be a better way. Facts matter, so I'm not for a second saying that
progressives should ignore the superior research that supports an increase. But I think we should also fight
this one on basic fairness. It's simply shameful, in an era of sharply increasing economic inequality, for
Congress to incessantly cut rich people's taxes yet refuse to help low-wage workers.
Format: News Commentary
Source: J. Bradford DeLong, TomPaine.com
Date: June 15, 2006
"No," said former Fox News journalist Tony Snow, newly appointed as George W. Bush's press secretary, when
asked recently about his retirement savings. "As a matter of fact, I was even too dopey to get in on a 401(k)."
Snow's case holds important lessons. To the extent that the Bush administration has a coherent philosophy for
domestic policy, it is the idea of the "ownership society." As Americans look at [our] Gordian knot of public
policy problems, we should learn one thing from the example of Tony Snow: the vision of an "ownership society"
espoused by Bush is simply not plausible. If it were, his new press secretary would not be describing himself
as "dopey."
Format: News Commentary
Source: David Moberg, In These Times
Date: June 8, 2006
Take a moment to
savor the convictions of top Enron executives Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling. Anything short of those verdicts
would have been outrageous. Keep in mind that Lay and Skilling aren't anomalies in the corporate world. The
problem, however, isn't just these bad apples. It's the barrel they're in. No effective system exists to
hold corporations accountable to the public, their workers or even their owners.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Robert B. Reich, TomPaine.com
Date: June 6, 2006
Before your good senator pulls the plug on the estate tax, consider this: the earnings of nearly everyone used
to rise with rising productivity. That's no longer true. Today's workers are 24% more productive than they
were five years ago but their median real earnings have barely budged. Wealth is even more lopsided than
income. Thirty years ago, the richest 1% owned less than a fifth of America's wealth. Now, they own more than
a third. Not since the days of the robber barons of the 19th century have we seen this much wealth concentrated
in so few hands. Repeal the estate tax and within a few decades control over America's productive assets will
be in the hands of non-productive Americans who never lifted a finger in their lives except to speed-dial their
financial advisors.
Enron verdicts affirm idea of accountability
Format: News Commentary
Source: Diane Stafford, Kansas City Star
Date: May 26, 2006
Guilty verdicts for Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling won't restore retirement security to
the Enron workers who lost their jobs and nest eggs. But the verdict against Enron's top executives was a
psychic victory on many counts. Let's hope that workers everywhere take note. Pay attention to your
conscience. Power does corrupt. It has for eons. But good people, good workers, generally have a sense of right
and wrong. Pay attention to your conscience. Don't let the lure of being in the old boys' network corrupt
you. The wheels of justice may grind slowly, and they may not travel over all who should be squashed, but they
do grind on. Get out of their way when you can. You may do more than save your job and your savings.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Tamara Draut, Cindy Zeldin, TomPaine.com
Date: May 23, 2006
New Jersey recently enacted legislation requiring health insurers in the state to extend
dependent coverage for young adults up to age 30. A handful of other states have extended the age limit to the
mid-20s, but none have gone as far as New Jersey. What this legislation--and the problem it
addresses--underscores is just how much our economy has changed and how little our public policies have done to
address the needs of working Americans, and young working Americans in particular. As health insurance becomes
more important, more costly, and increasingly rare as an employee benefit, young adults should demand that our
national leaders tackle the important economic challenges that have conspired to create this generation without
benefits.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Holly Sklar, Paul Sherry, TomPaine.com
Date: May 19, 2006
A values movement is on the rise across the nation in red states and blue, from Arizona to
Ohio, Arkansas to Pennsylvania. It's pulling Americans together to raise the minimum wage--instead of pushing
us apart. "The minimum wage is a bedrock moral value. The minimum wage is where society draws the line: this
low and no lower. Our bottom line is this: a job should keep you out of poverty, not keep you in it." That's
the winning message of the Let Justice Roll Living Wage Campaign , a fast-growing nonpartisan program of 70
faith, labor and community organizations working to raise the minimum wage at the federal and state level. Let
Justice Roll's success is rooted in its appeal to people to see a decent minimum wage as a moral value as well
as an economic value.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Dean Baker, TomPaine.com
Date: May 10, 2006
At a time
when tens of millions of workers are struggling to pay for gas for their car, electricity for their home, and
medical care for their families, the Republicans have stepped forward with a plan to help. They want to give
another $20 to $30 billion in tax cuts to the rich. This temporary assistance to the needy rich (TANR) takes
the form of a 2-year extension of a tax cut that made the maximum tax rate on stock dividends and capital gain
income 15%. While tens of millions of ordinary workers pay income tax rates of 25% on their wages, the
Republicans argue that Bill Gates and his billionaire friends shouldn't have to pay taxes at more than a 15%
rate. Most of this tax break goes to the richest 1% of the population.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Shikha Dalmia, TomPaine.com
Date: May 8, 2006
Denying
public services to people who pay their taxes is an affront to America's bedrock belief in fairness. But many
"pull-up-the-drawbridge" politicians want to do just that when it comes to illegal immigrants. The fact that
illegal immigrants pay taxes at all will come as news to many Americans. A stunning two-thirds of illegal
immigrants pay Medicare, Social Security and personal income taxes. The cost of undocumented aliens is an issue
that immigrant bashers have created to whip up indignation against people they don't want here in the first
place. Illegals are not milking the government. If anything, it is the other way around.
Format: Editorial
Source: Editorial, Boston Globe
Date: May 8, 2006
The federal government doesn't have the money or manpower to regularly
police the nation's workplaces. If it is serious about enforcement, it needs other tools. One solution is to
build a fast, secure, electronic verification system that would confirm the immigration status of job
candidates. Just as merchants do with credit cards, employers would swipe a Social Security card, driver's
license, green card, or other document and get a response in a minute or less. Such a system is technologically
possible. Officials should take enough time to ensure that the system provides fast, fair, and scrupulously
accurate responses. Rigorous safeguards must be a priority. A reliable, secure system would be one way to help
employers identify people who are legally eligible to work.
It's time for national health insurance
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Ron Gettelfinger, Detroit News
Date: May 5, 2006
You've probably noticed more media attention than usual focused on America's
dysfunctional health care system during the past several days thanks to "Cover the Uninsured Week," a uniquely
American event because the United States is the only advanced industrialized nation without some form of
universal health care coverage. The harsh reality is that a large and growing number of lower- and
middle-income working Americans are forgoing preventive care and putting off medical treatment because they
can't pay for both health care and basic necessities like food, housing, gas and electricity. But isn't there
a better way? Of course. National health insurance made sense when President Harry Truman proposed it in 1948.
Today, it may be the only sensible way to fix America's health care crisis.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Paul Krugman, InsideBayArea.com
Date: May 3, 2006
Many pundits see
red at the words "single-payer system." They think it means low-quality socialized medicine; they start telling
horror stories--almost all of them false--about the problems of other countries' health care. Yet there's
nothing foreign or exotic about the concept: Medicare is a single-payer system. It's not perfect, it could
certainly be improved, but it works. So here we are. Our current health care system is unraveling. Older
Americans are already covered by a national health insurance system; extending that system to cover everyone
would save money, reduce financial anxiety and save thousands of American lives every year. Why don't we just
do it?
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Thomas I. Palley, TomPaine.com
Date: May 3, 2006
A
lot of newspaper ink has been spilled over immigration. So why write another op-ed? Because the economics
behind the debate remains badly out of focus, and understanding those economics is key to carving a passage
through this nastiest of political wedge issues. House Republicans favor a get-tough on workers approach. The
Senate supports a more business-friendly approach that establishes a guest worker program while also offering
existing illegal immigrants a path to citizenship. Both approaches are deeply flawed because they ignore
worker's rights, and because they fail to tackle the role of business in illegal immigration. Failure to
address worker's rights means failing to help those who have been harmed by illegal immigration, while failure
to tackle business' contribution means that illegal immigration will continue unabated.
My mother 'the illegal alien?'
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Robert Scheer, Truthdig
Date: May 2, 2006
It
was Monday evening, and there I was on a downtown Los Angeles street corner as dusk fell, watching the
pro-immigrant marchers stream past. I had just been moved to tears by one sign carried by what seemed to be a
family stating, "We are workers not criminals," when a fellow spectator began heckling the marchers. Reacting
without thinking, I heckled him--there was this instant hatred between myself and this man I had never met. It
startled me, this pent-up yet still raw rage over the persecution of immigrants. I know where it comes from: my
immigrant mother always lived with the fear of deportation. [Eventually] someone decided to grant her amnesty,
and that's what I want for all of the mothers and their kin whom I watched in Monday's march.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Geov Parrish, TomPaine.com
Date: May 1, 2006
Today the
largest yet wave of immigrant marches and rallies will take place in scores of cities across the United States.
Their immediate focus is proposed congressional reforms, the most prominent of which is a ruthlessly
exploitative "guest worker" proposal backed by President Bush that would leave immigrants' legal standing
wholly at the mercy of a single employer. But the larger issue is America's imposition of corporate-friendly
trade policies that have decimated economies in Mexico and elsewhere, spurring economic emigration to America,
while at the same time exporting millions of better-paying jobs from America itself. The immigrants' struggle
is not just legal, but economic, and a matter of self-respect and self-preservation; it is, in important ways,
the leading edge of a struggle all American workers are facing.
Discrimination, not illegal immigration, fuels black job crisis
Format: News Commentary
Source: Earl Ofari Hutchinson, New America Media
Date: April 24, 2006
Dumping the blame for the chronic job crisis of young, poor
black men on undocumented immigrants stokes the passions and hysteria of immigration reform opponents, but it
also lets employers off the hook for discrimination. And it's easy to see how that could happen. The mountain
of federal and state anti-discrimination laws, affirmative action programs and successful employment
discrimination lawsuits give the public the impression that job discrimination is a relic of a shameful, racist
past. But that isn't the case. Even if there was not a single illegal immigrant in America, many black job
seekers would still find themselves shut out.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Beth Shulman, TomPaine.com
Date: April 24, 2006
General Motors' announcement that that it would no longer provide traditional pensions was stunning because
of its size. Yet GM is hardly alone in trying to pare down or eliminate conventional pensions. The impact of
simply wiping out traditional pensions resonates far beyond corporate boardrooms and company shareholders.
It's a unilateral move to cut out a main clause of our social contract, the model that a majority of Americans
and their families have relied on for nearly three quarters of a century. Are we really ready as a society to
declare the end of retirement as we know it? At the very least, shouldn't we have a serious, national
conversation before we simply accept a major shift that will have such a significant impact on our economy and
the quality of life in our country for generations to come?
Format: News Commentary
Source: Charlotte Fishman, Inside Higher Ed
Date: April 20, 2006
Until
recently, the interests of graduate students have largely been ignored by university "family friendly"
initiatives designed to meet the needs of women on the tenure track who aspire to be mothers as well as
scholars. So it shouldn't be surprising that Stanford University announced its new Childbirth Policy for women
graduate students with fanfare, nor that it was positively received by the national news media. What's
puzzling is how little attention has been paid to the huge gap between Stanford's aspiration and its
accomplishment.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: David Abraham et al, Sun-Sentinel
Date: April 19, 2006
The janitors and groundskeepers on strike at the University of Miami are protesting unfair
labor practices by their employer, UNICCO. Many of the alleged practices concern interference by UNICCO with
the workers' legally protected rights to unionize. In the face of UNICCO's and UM's concerted invocation of
the rhetoric of democracy, it is important to be clear on a few points. We call on the UM administration to
exercise its moral authority as UNICCO's employer and to tell UNICCO to follow its own practices elsewhere and
let the workers decide whether to unionize by their preferred method.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Bradford Plumer, TomPaine.com
Date: April 19, 2006
How
pronounced is inequality in America? Between 1979 and 2003, the income of the richest 1% of Americans more than
doubled, the income of the middle 15% grew by only 15%, and the income of the poorest 20% barely budged.
Incomes in the United States are far more unequal than in other industrialized countries, while mobility,
contrary to widespread myth, is hardly much better--if you are born poor in America, you are very likely to
stay that way your entire life. In politics, this all matters very much. Between 1989 and 1994, Senators were
very responsive to the preferences of the upper third of the income spectrum, somewhat less attentive to the
middle third, and completely ignored the policy preferences of the poorest third of Americans.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Gar Alperovitz, TomPaine.com
Date: April 14, 2006
The
United States is the most inequitable advanced nation in the world. Indeed, it is literally feudal: the top 1%
of wealth holders owns roughly half of all financial and business wealth. This extraordinary situation is bad
not only for those at the bottom of the economic pyramid, but for the nation as a whole. You don't have to be
a radical to recognize that, historically, huge political power regularly follows huge wealth, with disastrous
implications for democracy. Signs of growing public concern over the wealthy not paying their fare share can be
found just beneath the radar of media attention in many parts of the country.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Froma Harrop, TomPaine.com
Date: April 13, 2006
Congress is apparently too busy tending to the highest-income Americans to pay much attention to the
lowest-income Americans. Washington Republicans are now hard at work extending investment tax cuts that will
enrich folks making more than $10 million a year by an average $500,000. They have no time for raising the
minimum wage--in addition to having no interest in it. At $5.15 an hour since 1997, the federal minimum wage
lingers at a 50-year low when adjusted for inflation. So the job of maintaining a basic level of decency in the
labor market falls to the states. Some that have long mandated higher minimum wages are raising them still
more, while other states that have relied on the federal government's sorry standards are taking matters into
their own hands for the first time.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Lee Drutman, TomPaine.com
Date: April 13, 2006
When it
comes to government follow-through in punishing corporate crime, Enron is a true shining star. Unfortunately,
the rest of the universe is rather dim--particularly when it comes to crimes where the victims don't happen to
be wealthy investors. Consider the Sago mining disaster, which claimed the lives of 12 miners on January 2.
Workplace safety is an ongoing problem, and not just in mines. More than 5,500 workers are killed on the job
each year (an average of 15 per day), and another 4.7 million suffer serious injuries. Sure, financial fraud
now gets punished with almost as much force as an under-funded Justice Department white-collar unit can
muster--as it should. But when it comes to issues like health and safety, the Justice Department seems content
to let companies pretty much do as they like.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Max B. Sawicky, TomPaine.com
Date: April 12, 2006
Spring is
here, and irresponsible politicians' thoughts turn to tax cuts. And why not? So far there has been no apparent
penalty. The president's budget for 2007 calls for another $1.7 trillion in tax cuts over the next 10 years,
well over the amount of fictional spending cuts they pretend will reduce the deficit. Republican leaders on the
Hill echo the need to lock in the tax changes since 2001, on the grounds that they have given us a strong
economy. In almost every dimension, the course of the economy since 2001 has been worse than in previous
recoveries. Thus far in terms of job and wage growth, it has been slow going. In light of previous recoveries,
if the economic trends are attributed to the tax cuts, the cuts have been a miserable failure.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Nathan Newman, TomPaine.com
Date: April 11, 2006
Forget the stalled debate in Congress. State legislatures are already barreling ahead on
immigration legislation. And the choices could not be more stark. While some states are embracing criminalizing
undocumented immigrants, other states are embracing progressive policies that will boost wages for all American
workers and solve the root causes of low-wage immigration. The real fear by most Americans is that immigrants
are driving down wages for existing American workers. However, rather than further punish exploited immigrant
workers in the underground economy, many state leaders recognize that a better solution is to end the
exploitive conditions that make hiring lower-paid immigrants so attractive for employers in the first place.
Pro-immigrant marches surging nationwide
Format: News Commentary
Source: Marc Cooper, The Nation
Date: April 10, 2006
For the second time in two
weeks an American city was rocked Sunday by a pro-immigrant demonstration of undeniably historic magnitude. As
many as a half-million people, wearing white and waving American flags crammed downtown Dallas. The
demonstration rivaled the scope of the so-called "Gran Marcha" in Los Angeles two weeks ago--an event that to
many observers marked the birth of a new civil rights movement. And on Monday even more massive pro-immigration
demonstrations are scheduled for 140 more American cities in a national day of protest. The demonstrators are
calling for liberalized reform, which would legalize migrants already working in the U.S. and provide expanded
channels for future legal immigration.
Format: News Commentary
Source: Sam Graham-Felsen, The Nation
Date: April 10, 2006
Bowing to insurmountable
pressure from France's students and labor unions, President Jacques Chirac has repealed the CPE law. The
students won because they put together an extraordinary protest movement. The mainstream media has labelled
these students reactionaries, protectors of an outmoded status quo, conservatives. These students are
anything but conservative; they are visionaries. They are struggling to redefine the globalized world. They
refuse to inherit a society of savage capitalism in which worker's rights are constantly undermined in the
name of efficiency. They have won the first major victory in what I believe is the great moral struggle of my
generation: taming global capitalism.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Steffie Woolhandler, David Himmelstein, TomPaine.com
Date: April 7, 2006
Unfortunately, Massachusetts' new health reform legislation looks set to repeat
[a] disaster. The legislation offers empty promises and ignores real--and popular--solutions. Study after
study--by the Congressional Budget Office, the General Accounting Office and even the Massachusetts Medical
Society--have confirmed that single payer is the only route to affordable universal coverage. But single payer
national health insurance threatens the multi-million dollar paychecks of insurance executives, and the
outrageous profits of drug companies and medical entrepreneurs. It's time for politicians to stand up to the
insurance and drug industries and pass health reform that can work.
Format: Editorial
Source: Studs Terkel, Chicago Tribune
Date: April 7, 2006
Respect on the job and a voice at the workplace shouldn't be something Americans have to work
overtime to achieve. Their work is more than an inanimate unit of labor, and they deserve to knock off at the
end of the day with the same dignity they clocked in with. Feelings of self-respect, appreciation and pride do
not show up on economic forecasts or on a profit and loss spreadsheet, but they are the result of decent pay
for honest work. The security a breadwinner feels knowing a sick family member will receive the care they need.
The joy a mother and father experience when they can afford to help send their kids to college. When people
come together to join a union, they build something bigger and better for themselves and their families. They
create community. We could use more of that.
Format: Editorial
Source: Editorial, Washington Post
Date: April 6, 2006
The costs of draconian immigration policies are obvious. It might be worth persevering with
these policies if the benefits of lower immigration were truly significant. But at least one commonly cited
benefit--better wage prospects for low-skilled Americans--is not as powerful as is often claimed. It's true
that immigration presents a greater challenge to low-skilled workers than in the past. But attempts to measure
this effect suggest that it's either modest or nonexistent. Even a small impact on low-wage workers is
alarming, given the rise of inequality over the past 25 years. But the question is whether to address that
inequality by trying to stop immigration or to go at it via progressive taxation, larger public investments
designed to prevent poor kids from dropping out of high school, or some other policy tool.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Jeff Faux, TomPaine.com
Date: April 5, 2006
The
election year clamor to address illegal immigration has left Washington's normal political wiring in tangles.
The political confusion is understandable because none of [the] proposals will get at the root causes, which
are poverty and the lack of job opportunities south of the border. This was not supposed to happen. Thirteen
years ago we were assured that the North American Free Trade Agreement would transform Mexico into a prosperous
middle-class society. Unfortunately, NAFTA did not deliver. It is time for the leaders on this continent to
acknowledge that NAFTA has not fulfilled its promises and go back to the drawing boards. So long as the Mexican
economy cannot provide its people with economic opportunity, they will keep coming.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Thomas I. Palley, TomPaine.com
Date: April 3, 2006
For
the last year there has been a widening split in the ranks of American organized labor. This split risks
hardening as the new Change To Win coalition increasingly takes on the complexion of a rival labor federation
to the AFL-CIO. The split is simply the result of frustration at inability to reverse union decline. That said,
there is one major difference in priorities--but it remains out of focus and has not received the attention it
deserves. That difference concerns the significance of economic policy and politics in union strategy. It's an
issue that does not warrant a split, but it does warrant prime time and could even provide the frame for a
galvanizing debate that jump-starts the entire union movement and changes national politics.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Tom Barry, TomPaine.com
Date: March 30, 2006
A
common denominator unites the otherwise fractious immigration debate. That's the widespread congressional
concern with national security and border security. All the major players--whether anti-immigration
conservatives or pro-immigration liberals--stress that any new immigration legislation must ensure that
Americans are secure. But the real security issue that underlines the immigration issue is job security. Except
for political refugee cases, immigration is mainly a labor-market issue. Unless immigration policy is connected
to economic policies that encourage full employment and insist that workers are paid livable wages, job
security of citizens and other legal U.S. residents will be threatened.
Reality show for members of Congress
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Rosa Brooks, Miami Herald
Date: March 27, 2006
Here's an
idea for a reality TV show. The contestants will be drawn from the U.S. Congress. To start, they'll have their
credit cards, cellphones, computers and cars confiscated. Next, they'll be sent to live in rural villages and
urban shantytowns in poor countries. Each will be assigned a menial job in his new home, for which he will
receive $1 a day. They'll be instructed to make their way to a distant country, but they won't be provided
with money, a passport or transportation. Hardships along the route will include fording flood-prone rivers,
crossing dangerous deserts on foot and evading the armed gangs of smugglers and traffickers who will attempt to
rob, rape and kidnap them. Contestants will then have to covertly cross a border into a country guarded by
armed agents. Those who make it will then have to find food, shelter and employment in a place where they
don't know the language and are in constant danger of being detected, detained and deported by the
authorities. The only jobs available to them will be low-paying and often backbreaking labor. Any contestants
who manage to survive a full season will be offered the opportunity to draft a new immigration-reform bill for
the United States.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Anya Kamenetz, TomPaine.com
Date: March 24, 2006
The current youth
uprising in France has caught international observers off guard. We have a name for the French phenomenon here
in the United States: Generation Debt. It could not be an overabundance of restrictions on employers in the
United States that produces the high youth unemployment rate. We have the most "flexible" labor market in the
West, including a historically record-low minimum wage, a prevalence of temporary and part-time jobs and no
mandatory employer benefits such as health care. We haven't officially made it easier to fire young people,
but it's already just about as easy as it could be. And still young people lag behind in finding work. This
bleak picture is not inevitable.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Amy Traub, TomPaine.com
Date: March 23, 2006
The
Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act [could] bring the nation's undocumented workers "out of the
shadows" of their illegal status and formally recognize their critical role in the American economy. Known as
McCain-Kennedy, the bill would provide three-year work visas to applicants from abroad as well as undocumented
workers currently in the United States. The debate over McCain-Kennedy comes down to this: do we take a stand
against the principle of a guest worker program that would permanently institutionalize a two-tier labor
market, even if a better solution seems a long way off? Or, focusing on the dramatic problems with a status quo
that exploits undocumented workers and undermines their native counterparts, do we fight for the partial
solution that seems within reach?
Format: Advice Column
Source: Liz Ryan, BusinessWeek
Date: March 22, 2006
Some
old myths die hard. Job seekers have created their own mythology around the recruitment-and-selection process,
and from time to time these myths bubble up to people like me, who get to poke holes in them. Here are some
myths that you may have heard, and the corresponding truths of the matter.
Immigrant children: America's future
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Nancy K. Cauthen, TomPaine.com
Date: March 20, 2006
We need national leadership that understands and cares about the needs of immigrant workers
and their families. Immigrant children, and the much larger group of children born in the U.S. of immigrant
parents, are at great risk for living in poverty, which compromises their health, safety and futures. Living on
the edge even as their parents work extremely hard, these children are less likely than other children to
receive help from government programs that protect low-wage workers and their families. This is a paradox we
cannot continue to ignore. Assisting the children of immigrants is central to promoting the economic security
of America's families.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Holly Sklar, TomPaine.com
Date: March 17, 2006
We
are living the American Dream in reverse. The share of national income going to wages and salaries is at the
lowest level since 1929--the year that kicked off the Great Depression. The share going to after-tax corporate
profits is at the highest level since 1929. Fueled by obscene wage inequality and tax cuts, income and wealth
are piling up at the very top. More and more jobs are keeping people in poverty instead of out of poverty.
Middle-class households are a medical crisis, outsourced job or busted pension away from bankruptcy. Contrary
to myth, the United States is not becoming more competitive in the global economy by taking the low road. The
high road is not only the better road, it is the only road for progress in the future. An America that doesn't
work for working people is not an America that works.
Rude awakening in the workplace
Format: Advice Column
Source: Liz Ryan, BusinessWeek
Date: March 16, 2006
If
you start a new job nowadays, get ready to absorb a load of information in a hurry. The typical employee
orientation lasts a day and is jam-packed with facts. You'll learn what each department does and where it's
located, the chairman's favorite football team, and a few hundred other details designed to help you navigate
your new office. So it's funny that, during this barrage, no one fills you in on a few points of basic
workplace etiquette. But it's not too late. Here are 10 tips for office types--hang them near the coffee
station.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Thomas I. Palley, TomPaine.com
Date: March 13, 2006
This
is not about predicting when the next recession will happen, but rather about its character. It is possible to
anticipate future difficulties and proscribe possible remedies. First, the Federal Reserve should be very
careful about over-shooting with its rate hikes, and at this time it should take an inflation chill pill.
Second, the current recovery has been extraordinarily weak, which should finally discredit the notion that tax
cuts for the rich drive growth and job creation. Third, the speculative financial market paradigm--which has
ruled the policy roost for twenty-five years--is out of gas. It is time for a new paradigm that links growth to
rising wages, rather than to asset price boom-bust cycles.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Coco McCabe, TomPaine.com
Date: March 9, 2006
Disasters are
discriminatory. Recoveries shouldn't be. But the one on the Gulf Coast is headed that way unless something
quickly changes with how billions of federal dollars are being allocated to address the housing crisis caused
by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The Gulf Coast stands a slim chance of a solid recovery if it can't offer
decent housing for the residents--the fishermen, the farmers, the laborers, the hospitality workers--that fuel
its economy. If Mississippi and Louisiana are serious about seeing their regional economies recover, they need
to make sure there is a range of affordable housing for their workers. Folks making the minimum wage or
scraping by with seasonal work must have places to live that their salaries can support.
New economy hurting people in the middle the most
Format: Political Column
Source: Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post
Date: March 8, 2006
The last several years have been marked by low unemployment, strong economic growth, robust
productivity gains and record corporate profits. Normally, you'd expect most Americans to be doing pretty
well. As it happens, however, inflation-adjusted income for all but a tiny fraction of the wealthiest
households hasn't increased at all. So what gives? Why is there such a disconnect between economic growth and
household income? What happened to all the money? Fundamental changes in the structure of the labor, product
and capital markets are accelerating a long-term trend toward income inequality.
Should you take a buyout offer?
Format: Advice Column
Source: Colleen DeBaise, SmartMoney
Date: March 7, 2006
As companies
struggle with global competition and industry consolidation, many are considering the use of buyouts to reduce
the size of work forces and rein in costs. That may help a company's bottom line, but for employees there's
much to consider before calling it quits. A worker faced with a buyout offer must carefully examine the terms
and consider where he or she stands in terms of career and finances. One must also consider the health of the
company, which may be trimming labor costs in an effort to avoid bankruptcy. Employees faced with a buyout
should review their retirement plans, bonus schedules, stock options, and even additional items such as
vacation days and sick time. A worker who accepts a buyout often must agree to give up all legal claims against
the company.
Format: News Commentary
Source: Bernie Horn, TomPaine.com
Date: March 7, 2006
For two months, the media has covered the Fair Share Health Care controversy as if it were a fierce storm
sweeping across the nation, with Wal-Mart and labor unions supplying the thunder and lightning. Reporters have
all but ignored the larger story--that Fair Share has altered the climate of the health care debate. That's a
big claim for such a modest law. Maryland's Fair Share Health Care Act merely requires companies with more
than 10,000 employees to pay at least eight percent of payroll expenses for health care, or pay any shortfall
to the state. Yet look at the reaction nationwide. What's the big deal? Fair Share affects only a few
companies and a relatively few employees. It can't put a dent in our nation's healthcare problems, can it?
Format: Political Column
Source: Thomas Palley, TomPaine.com
Date: March 3, 2006
Jeff Faux
and Gene Sperling are two titans of Democratic economic policy. Faux is a political economist, and therefore
emphasizes politics in his analysis. Political power lies behind economic policy. On one side is a new
globalized uber-capitalist class. On the other side are the rest of us, workers everywhere--not just in the
United States. Sperling is a policy economist, and accordingly his outlook emphasizes policy--fiscal
responsibility, policies to help workers adjust to trade-related job losses, public investment in education and
tax incentives to help people save and accumulate wealth. Faux seeks a reconfiguration that is nothing short of
paradigm change. Sperling accepts the current paradigm and is content with small adjustments. These
foundational economic differences have not been adequately framed. Democrats must come to grips with them, so
here is a stab at framing them.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Barry Lynn, TomPaine.com
Date: February 15, 2006
It
is not as if we need to search long for evidence of the problems traditionally associated with monopoly.
Capture of political power? Consider Boeing's hold over the Bush administration. Extreme pricing distortions?
We see them throughout Wal-Mart's supply system. Artificial control over what technologies are brought to
market and when? One blatant example is the power over renewable energy systems of British Petroleum and Royal
Dutch Shell. Extreme profiteering? America's big energy companies have not only resurrected the art of gouging
the consumer, they have raised it to a new state of perfection. As bad as these old-fashioned problems may be,
many of our 21st-century global oligopolies appear to pose entirely new dangers.
Officials are blind to abuse heaped on Gulf day laborers
Format: News Commentary
Source: Cecilia Muñoz, Pacific News Service
Date: February 9, 2006
When I heard that the Governor of Louisiana [said] she had no idea
that immigrant workers rebuilding New Orleans are suffering abuse at the hands of employers, I couldn't
believe my ears. What is happening in the Gulf Coast is an exaggerated version of what happens around the
country. We benefit from immigrants' hard work, but we are unwilling to respect their rights or see to it that
these are properly enforced. We allow immigrants to work in our country's most dangerous jobs, yet we deny
them access to care or compensation when they are injured. Then we attack them on the airwaves for being here
at all. I'm familiar with that story. But it still surprises me when the people who are supposed to be leading
our country fail to see it as well.
Why so many blacks fear illegal immigrants - pt. 1
Format: Political Column
Source: Earl Ofari Hutchinson, BlackNews.com
Date: February 6, 2006
Nationally, many
blacks are unabashed in fingering illegal immigrants, mostly Mexicans, for the poverty and job dislocation in
black communities. Illegal immigration is not the prime reason so many poor young blacks are on the streets,
and why some turn to gangs, guns and drug dealing to get ahead. A shrinking economy, savage state and federal
government cuts in and the elimination of job and skills training programs, failing public schools, a soaring
black prison population, and employment discrimination are still the major reasons for the grim employment
prospects and poverty in inner city black neighborhoods.
Format: Editorial
Source: Editorial, Washington Post
Date: February 4, 2006
The Bush administration has put administrators with business ties to the mining industry at
the head of MSHA. Those administrators have promoted a less punitive, more cooperative regulatory atmosphere,
kept penalties for safety violations low and withdrawn proposed safety regulations. West Virginia's
congressional delegation has proposed legislation to stiffen MSHA's spine, but the agency itself has the tools
to regulate more stiffly. What its leaders need is a change of attitude, not a change of rules. Along with
Congress and the White House, they should start analyzing not just the mistakes made in recent accidents but
whether the more cooperative regulatory model itself is working.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Ruben Navarrette, San Diego Union-Tribune
Date: February 1, 2006
In college, my African-American friends and I used to call it "the black-brown thing."
It's the uneasy tension--and occasional conflict--between the nation's largest minority and the group that
formerly held the title. In the 1990s, the phenomenon was most prevalent in major cities such as Los Angeles,
New York, Chicago and Miami--large urban centers where significant numbers of African-Americans and Latinos
lived side by side. Today, ground zero is New Orleans, where a lot of African-Americans are no longer sure they
want to live and where a lot more Latinos have gone to find work.
Working, writing woman looks back, ahead
Format: Political Column
Source: Carol Kleiman, Chicago Tribune
Date: January 31, 2006
Four decades ago, when I was a part-time copy editor and freelance writer for the Chicago
Tribune, a suburban wife of an executive and mother of three children, the features editor of the Tribune
called me. He had noticed something unusual: women were going to work! He said as he rode on his commuter train
he actually saw women going into downtown Chicago, not to shop but to work. Would I cover this revolution,
would I write the column that he had dreamed up, the first of its kind in the U.S.? I covered what was
happening and also tried to empower people. While I was at it, a lot of changes happened on my beat--and to
me.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: John Edwards, TomPaine.com
Date: January 31, 2006
America is losing the most important element of our national character: We are no longer the land of
opportunity for all. Generations before us came to America for one reason. This is the land where everyone who
worked hard would be rewarded, could raise a family and could make a better life for their children. But
America has changed. Now, hard work does not guarantee a decent standard of living, and our children do not
believe they can achieve the successes of their parents. It should not be that way. When history judges us, as
a nation and as individuals, it will ask: What did we do to end poverty? How we answer this call will forever
define us as a nation--showing the world how America leads or how we fail to live up to our most cherished
values.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Cindy Zeldin, TomPaine.com
Date: January 30, 2006
In
tomorrow's State of the Union address, President Bush is widely expected to promote an expansion of Health
Savings Accounts, or HSAs, as the new cornerstone of his ownership society agenda. His rhetoric will be about
personal empowerment, but his push for insurance that exposes consumers to more individual risk belies the
financial squeeze faced by a growing number of middle-class Americans. Instead of targeting federal dollars
toward new tax breaks, perhaps a better approach would be to steer health policy toward solutions that make
health care more affordable for the middle class and address the growing crisis of medical debt.
Format: Political Column
Source: Albert B. Crenshaw, Washington Post
Date: January 29, 2006
The long-predicted ice age is settling in on America's private pension system, as
companies large and small, profitable and unprofitable, announce the freezing of their traditional plans, the
kind that once promised a lifetime income for retirees. The likely result of this, if nothing changes, will be
a world with a large number of retirees struggling to make ends meet, and a smaller number who through luck or
skill have turned their 401(k) into a small fortune. If all this doesn't sound appealing, start talking to
your senators and members of Congress now. Stop sneering at unions. Think about what kind of future you want
and start working for it. It's usually a lot cheaper to prevent an ailment than to cure it.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Jeff Faux, TomPaine.com
Date: January 27, 2006
The world's rich
and powerful are heading this week to their annual meeting in the plush mountain resort of Davos, Switzerland.
There may be some bad new ahead for Davos. After a quarter of a century, the world is beginning to resist
policies that have shifted wealth and power away from people who work for a living to those who invest. Perhaps
more important, Davos' chief champion--the U.S. governing class--is in trouble. The erosion of the American
social contract--already being reflected in stagnant wages, financial insecurity and [a] collapsing health care
system--could soon force the governing class to pay more attention to Bloomington, Ill., than to Baghdad, Iraq.
The question is, as always, who sets the rules and in whose interests?
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Robert L. Borosage, Troy Peters, TomPaine.com
Date: January 26, 2006
In his coming State of the Union address, George W. Bush will tout the success of his economic
policies, and call for making his tax cuts permanent. Most Americans may sensibly wonder just what country the
president is living in. The president's policies have helped produce an economy that works for the boardroom
but not for the shop floor. Corporate profits, productivity, stocks and CEO salaries are all up. But this
economy isn't working for most Americans worrying over their kitchen tables about how to make ends meet.
Incomes aren't keeping up with rising costs. Families are sinking deeper in debt. The cost of basics like
health care, home heating and college are soaring out of sight. A secure retirement is increasingly a distant
dream.
Ford takes a tax holiday for 'jobs creation'
Format: News Commentary
Source: Allan Sloan, Washington Post
Date: January 24, 2006
It's almost enough to make you laugh--bitterly, of course. Here was Ford announcing that
it had cut 10,000 jobs last year and that it will cut up to 30,000 more. But shedding jobs at muscle-car
acceleration rates didn't stop Ford from pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars courtesy of the American
Jobs Creation Act. I'm not making this up. Right there, on one of its news releases, Ford said that
"repatriation of foreign earnings pursuant to the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 resulted in a permanent
tax savings of about $250 million." How can you simultaneously cut jobs and benefit from the American Jobs
Creation Act? Welcome to the wonderful world of Washington nomenclature.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Harold Meyerson, Washington Post
Date: January 18, 2006
The battle for a life of middle-class dreams and security is fought region by region, even
town by town. Time was when it was fought contract by contract, but that was in an America where unions
represented one-third of the private-sector workforce rather than today's anemic 8%. In a global economy, the
conventional wisdom would have it, the bargaining power of unions is the ultimate spent force. But not all of
our economy is global, nor all our labor exportable. Least of all is it exportable in the hotel industry, a
sector that employs 1.3 million workers in this country, most at poverty wages. So it will remain, unless the
hotel union--UNITE HERE--can find a way to do something that hardly any American union has done in recent
decades: organize an industry.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: J. Bradford DeLong, TomPaine.com
Date: January 17, 2006
In today's world, only national governments are large enough to be able to ensure that
pension assets will actually be there when workers retire. If there is an economic service or benefit that
citizens value extremely highly and that only the government can provide, then the government should provide
it. Economists know that there are many drawbacks to expanding the role of government. But the collection of
payroll taxes and the writing of pension checks is the kind of routine, semi-automatic task that government can
do well. It is even more important and valuable that government does it in our post-industrial, network-age
society than it was in the past.
Format: Editorial
Source: New York Times
Date: January 14, 2006
In the past, the public
dialogue about Corporate America's move away from traditional pensions for retirees centered on struggling
industries--steel, airlines--that had dumped their pension obligations on the federal government. But the
announcement last week that the financially healthy technology giant I.B.M. will freeze its pension system
reiterates the message businesses are increasingly sending their employees: you're on your own.
Alito: should workers trust his actions, or his words?
Format: News Commentary
Source: Paula Brantner, Workplace Fairness
Date: January 11, 2006
This week,
the biggest show in town (Washington, DC, that is, and perhaps the rest of the country, too) is the hearings on
Samuel Alito's nomination to be a Supreme Court justice. Senators purport to be hanging on every word Alito
says in the hearings to divine whether he will make an appropriate Supreme Court justice. Whether that's true,
or whether, instead, most senators' minds are pretty much made up, it's hard to put that much stock in
Alito's testimony at the hearings, when we have so much evidence of his views from his published opinions over
his last fifteen years as a federal judge. And that's not good news for workers, regardless of what Judge
Alito says this week.
Judge at odds with interests of state workers
Format: Editorial
Source: David Newby, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Date: January 8, 2006
A
single mother finds she's now unable to take time off from work in a medical emergency. An African-American
woman who was promoted twice in her first few years on the job loses out on her next promotion and isn't
granted her day in court to prove her race discrimination case against her employer. Newspaper reporters
working more than 40 hours a week are denied overtime pay. These violations of workers' fundamental rights
have one thing in common: Judge Samuel Alito's rulings would have made them possible. Alito's decisions and
dissents on many cases involving workers reveal a disturbing tendency to take a restrictive and narrow view of
the protections Congress has afforded to workers over many decades.
Strip clubs, such sweet sorrow
Format: News Commentary
Source: Allen Wastler, CNN/Money
Date: January 5, 2006
A lot of people
are reading the story about Morgan Stanley firing four men for going to a strip club with a client. If you
haven't been following the company's travails, it settled a sex discrimination lawsuit in mid-2004 for $54
million. Since that settlement, the company has set up a policy against employees going to "exclusionary"
events. Going to a "gentlemen's club" is an exclusionary event. (Some Neanderthals among you may argue that
strip clubs don't "exclude" women. Go stand beside a Chippendales dancer and see if you want the comparison.)
If this case is any indication, such frolics are likely to fade away. Deals should be based on facts and
figures and honest negotiation...not on who paid for the most lap dances.
Format: Editorial
Source: Editorial, Washington Post
Date: January 4, 2006
The mere thought of being trapped at the bottom of a coal mine is horrible enough to send
shivers down most people's backs. But after the explosion that trapped 13 men in a West Virginia coal mine
early Monday, an equally chilling story of safety neglect may be emerging as well. Safety problems at [the
mine] should have caused officials at the Mine Safety and Health Administration to take notice. Once purely an
enforcement agency, set up to make sure that mines followed safety regulations, the MSHA has in the past
several years formed a series of "partnerships" with mining industry groups. They might have allowed the agency
to become too friendly with the businesses it regulates. When Congress comes back to town, we'd like to hear
some open discussion about the health of the nation's mine inspections.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Amy M. Traub, TomPaine.com
Date: January 4, 2006
Undocumented immigrants are on the road to becoming a permanent underclass, undermining middle-class wages and
working conditions, because they don't have the means to enforce their own rights in the workplace. But, by
making sure workplace laws--from the minimum wage to the right to organize a union--truly apply to all
workers, we can bring undocumented immigrants into the economic mainstream and help level the playing field for
other workers. Middle-class and aspiring middle-class Americans should support workplace rights for immigrants
not just out of compassion for mistreated immigrants, but because they want to preserve their own job standards
and the opportunity to improve them.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Robert B. Reich, TomPaine.com
Date: January 3, 2006
It seems
almost certain that in 2005, median incomes continued to drop. It's been that way for four years now, since
the end of the last recession. The economy keeps growing, but median incomes keep declining. Half of all
American workers are earning less now than they did in 2001. Rarely before in history has there been such a
long period of growth in the gross domestic product without most Americans sharing in that growth. Maybe it's
time we stopped measuring the success of the economy by how much larger the GDP is from one year to the next,
and started using a new measure that reflects how most of us are doing from one year to the next. Instead of
GDP, let's look at what might be called the MDP--median domestic prosperity.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: George F. Will, Washington Post
Date: December 29, 2005
In one of the biggest successes in the history of organized labor in the South, the 4,700
janitors working for Houston's four largest cleaning companies recently joined the Service Employees
International Union. The janitors, most of them immigrants, earn an average of $5.30 an hour--15 cents more
than the minimum wage--without health care benefits. The mobilization of the janitors is one sign of why Andy
Stern, head of the SEIU, is today's most important--perhaps the only really important--labor leader. He aims
to convince nonunion workers "that Ronald Reagan was wrong--that wealth does not trickle down." And that "Bill
Clinton also was wrong" in saying high-tech employment is the wave of the future.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Leonard Glantz, Washington Post
Date: December 18, 2005
The World Health Organization has announced that it will no longer hire smokers. WHO has
joined a long line of bigots who would not hire people of color, members of religious minorities, or disabled
or gay people because of who they are or what they lawfully do. The proper response to such an oppressive
condition of employment is for federal and state governments to adopt laws that prohibit job discrimination
based on activities that employees engage in outside the workplace that have no impact on job performance.
Several states have already adopted such laws, and WHO's actions demonstrate the need for them in every
jurisdiction.
Time to say no to unjust immigration bills
Format: News Commentary
Source: David Bacon, Pacific News Service
Date: December 9, 2005
Every new Republican proposal for immigration reform in Congress makes the
prospect for winning legal status for the nation's 12 million undocumented residents more remote. At the same
time, Congress appears ready to pass measures that will increase border deaths, lead to wholesale violations of
workers' rights and give the largest corporations a huge new bracero program. A strong coalition of immigrant
rights groups, unions, civil rights organizations and working families can build a movement powerful enough to
win legal status and rights for immigrants--and jobs and better wages for everyone. It's time to fight for
that.
For all workers fighting an uphill battle on the job
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Allan R. Jamail, Houston Chronicle
Date: December 9, 2005
Half of U.S. workers say they would form a union tomorrow to win fair treatment and a voice on the
job, but here in Houston and elsewhere in this country, workers are being lied to, harassed, threatened,
coerced, followed, disciplined and even fired when they try to exercise their legal right to form a union. When
employers violate the right of workers to form a union, everyone suffers. Our basic constitutional freedoms are
compromised. Wages fall, race and gender pay gaps widen, and workplace discrimination increases and job safety
standards disappear. Unions are the best tool we have for fighting poverty and bringing about social justice.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Robert Reich, TomPaine.com
Date: December 8, 2005
Tax
bills now wending their way through the House and Senate would cut about $60 billion in taxes next year. The
underlying question is, who ends up paying for Iraq, the Katrina cleanup, the Medicare drug benefit, homeland
security, everything else? If the House has its way, it won't be the super-rich, who will get their capital
gains and dividend tax cuts extended. If the Senate gets its way, it won't be the middle class, who would
otherwise be hit by the [Alternative Minimum Tax]. If the House and Senate compromise by giving both groups
what they want, there's only one group left. That group is the poor and near-poor.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Heather Boushey, TomPaine.com
Date: December 7, 2005
Recent media
coverage over whether moms are more likely to "opt out" of employment is simply hype, based on anecdote and
examination of mothers' participation in the labor force in isolation of overall labor market trends. The
reality is that mothers are now less likely to leave the labor market because of their children. The
main reason for declining labor force participation rates among women over the last four years appears to be
the weakness of the labor market. Rather than hyping anecdotes, we'd be better off focusing on solutions for
the very real struggles families face in finding the time and resources to care for one another.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Dean Baker, TomPaine.com
Date: December 5, 2005
In the
coming weeks, Republicans in the House and Senate desperate to pass tax cut bills will be repeating their
mantra that tax cuts "stimulate growth" in the economy. Democrats should put forward their own plan for tax
reform. As painful as it might be to acknowledge, Ronald Reagan's tax reform would be a good place to start.
The key idea behind the '86 reform was not to lower tax rates, but to eliminate loopholes. The '86 tax reform
treated all types of income--wage income, capital gains, dividends and rents--the same way. Reagan proudly
boasted when he signed the bill that people would now make money by working and investing, not gaming the tax
code.
Looking for a job and finding none
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Sandra McHenry, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Date: December 3, 2005
The scenario consists of being out of work for two years and having no dental or health insurance. I am
expected to work until age 67, five years from now, in order to collect full benefits from Social Security. I
don't qualify for Medicare until 65, which is three years away. Please let the dog bark or the alarm go off so
I can wake up from this nightmare! But the worst part is that I am awake. I am sitting at my computer,
completing yet another online application for employment. I am awake, and this trip does not end. When will
corporate America catch up to the groundwork that has been laid? I am not old enough to retire or to receive
any benefits, yet I am apparently too old to obtain employment for the next five years.
Tax relief or 'mere parsimony?'
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Sean Gonsalves, AlterNet
Date: November 30, 2005
United for a Fair Economy, a
nonpartisan think tank that tries to "raise awareness that concentrated wealth and power undermines the
economy," has a new report that examines whether there is a correlation between tax cuts and job creation. From
June 2003 to December 2004, only 2.6 million new jobs were created. "That's 1.5 million fewer jobs than
expected without implementing the tax cuts, and 2.9 million fewer jobs than promised with the tax cuts." Some
will consider this typical "liberal" drivel, but I consider it an affirmation of something the intellectual
father of conservatism observed. "Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an
essential part of true economy," wrote Edmund Burke.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: David Bacon, Truthout
Date: November 29, 2005
The Gulf Coast disaster is
having a profound and permanent effect on the area's workers and communities. The racial fault lines of
immigration politics threaten to pit Latinos against Blacks, and migrant laborers against community residents
hoping to return to their homes. Community organizations, labor, and civil rights advocates can all find common
ground in a reconstruction plan that puts the needs of people first. But flood-ravaged Mississippi and
Louisiana could also become a window into a different future, in which poor communities with little economic
power fight each other over jobs.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: E. J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post
Date: November 29, 2005
Decades ago, Walter Reuther, the storied head of the United Auto Workers union, was taken
on a tour of an automated factory by a Ford executive. Somewhat gleefully, the Ford honcho told the legendary
union leader: "You know, not one of these machines pays dues to the UAW." To which Reuther snapped: "And not
one of them buys new Ford cars, either." For 60 years New Dealers and social democrats, liberals and
progressives, insisted that few would embrace capitalism's innovations if the system's tendency toward
creative destruction was not balanced by public innovations to spread the bounty and protect millions from
being injured by change. It's a compelling story. Walter Reuther knew it well. Too bad it isn't told very
often anymore.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Thomas I. Palley, TomPaine.com
Date: November 28, 2005
The
global economy has been heading in the wrong direction, hollowing out the middle class in America while failing
to create a big enough middle class in the developing world. That hollowing-out process has long been visible
in U.S. statistics on wages and family income distribution. The global economy must shift from export-led
development to domestic market-led development. In an export-led world, higher wages undermine employment. In a
domestic market-led world, higher wages can promote employment. This is where labor standards and unions enter.
The challenge is to establish a system that has wages rising with productivity so that workers can buy what
they produce, rather than dumping it on world markets.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Liz Stanton, TomPaine.com
Date: November 23, 2005
President Bush agrees that creating good jobs is a priority. He has repeatedly promised that his large-scale
tax cuts will grow the economy and create new jobs. So should families planning their Thanksgiving feasts be
giving thanks to the tax cuts for having created a plethora of new jobs? Resoundingly, no. The Bush tax cuts
did not produce new jobs. The quality of jobs, measured by income, health insurance and retirement benefits,
has also declined appreciably since the 2001 tax cuts. The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts were a feast for the rich
taken directly from the tables of the poor, the working class, the middle class, people of color, children and
the elderly. These tax cuts have been a real turkey for the economy.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Jimmy Carter, Los Angeles Times
Date: November 14, 2005
I have become increasingly concerned by a host of radical government policies that now
threaten many basic principles espoused by all previous administrations, Democratic and Republican. These
include the rudimentary American commitment to peace, economic and social justice, civil liberties, our
environment and human rights. Our government has abandoned fiscal responsibility by unprecedented favors to the
rich, while neglecting America's working families. Members of Congress have increased their own pay by $30,000
per year since freezing the minimum wage at $5.15 per hour (the lowest among industrialized nations). It is
time for the deep and disturbing political divisions within our country to be substantially healed, with
Americans united in a common commitment to revive and nourish the historic political and moral values that we
have espoused during the last 230 years.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Robert L. Borosage, Troy Peters, TomPaine.com
Date: November 14, 2005
Across America, people are starting to realize the stark reality: Wal-Mart's triumph is the
defeat of middle-class America. In the 19th century, America faced a similar problem: corporate behemoths,
private fortunes amassed from exploiting workers, unions banned, politicians bought. It took a progressive
movement to put new rules around the marketplace--to break up monopolies, create the 40-hour work week,
institute the minimum wage, the right to organize, environmental protection, and workplace health and safety
laws. Now a new progressive movement is beginning to emerge. Once more, its agenda is to ban sweatshops, lift
wages, empower workers and curb corporate power. Wal-Mart is and must be that movement's first target.
Format: News Commentary
Source: Robert Scheer, The Nation
Date: November 9, 2005
You have to love California.
Yes, I'm buzzed by the stunning rejection of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's referendum revolution aimed at
turning this blue state red. That the voters soundly defeated his proposals to punish the public sector unions
and legislators who dared to cross the Terminator is a bellwether moment for the nation. Schwarzenegger was
defeated primarily by the hardworking public sector workers of the state: the teachers, firefighters and other
civil servants who are sick and tired of being pitted by politicians against those they are so dedicated to
serving. The power of the corporate interests has been checked primarily by the state's huge public service
workers unions.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Greg LeRoy, TomPaine.com
Date: November 9, 2005
Wal-Mart,
the Alpha Dog of discount stores, has also become the Alpha Hog at the public trough. The phenomenal growth of
the world's largest corporation has been supported by taxpayers in many states through economic development
subsidies. Giving subsidies to suburban retailing is bad policy on many levels. Taxpayer costs for economic
development are balanced by "benefits" that mostly consist of, well, workers' costs, consumers' costs and
taxpayers' costs. It's ironic that a company which promotes itself as a free enterprise success story is so
highly dependent on taxpayers.
On workers' rights, we can do better than this
Format: Op-Ed
Source: David Bonior, Austin American-Statesman
Date: November 8, 2005
There is no single code of law that is more openly dismissed and abused than our
nation's labor laws. I fundamentally believe that this is not the face America wants to show the world in the
21st Century. We are a better nation than this. We have a more fundamental respect for human rights than this.
The wholesale infringement on rights of all workers to earn a living, provide for their families and contribute
to their communities is, at its core, more than a series of obscure labor law infractions. It must be viewed
with more gravity. We should all take a stand and demand that workers' rights in the U.S. and around the world
are restored, guaranteed, and protected.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Paul Krugman, New York Times
Date: November 7, 2005
Employment-based health insurance is the only serious source of coverage for Americans too young to receive
Medicare and insufficiently destitute to receive Medicaid, but it's an institution in decline. The funny thing
is that the solution--national health insurance, available to everyone--is obvious. But to see the obvious
we'll have to overcome pride--the unwarranted belief that America has nothing to learn from other
countries--and prejudice--the equally unwarranted belief, driven by ideology, that private insurance is more
efficient than public insurance.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Sam Pizzigati, TomPaine.com
Date: November 7, 2005
Alan Greenspan, arguably the world economy's single most powerful figure, will finally ride off into the
sunset Jan. 31, after 18 years as the chair of the Federal Reserve Board. But don't expect the media spotlight
to stop shining on him. We will no doubt witness, over the next three months, a steady stream of over-the-top
tributes lauding Greenspan for his long tenure at the nation's economic helm. [One such] early tribute:
"Traders, investors and lawmakers would hang on every word." Well, not quite every word. Over the years,
economic movers and shakers have consistently ignored Greenspan whenever he started ruminating on one
particular subject. That subject? Inequality--the concentration of America's wealth and income in the hands of
its wealthiest citizens.
When the boss is a medical watchdog
Format: Editorial
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Date: November 4, 2005
Higher premiums.
Higher co-pays. Anyone with employer-provided health insurance has noticed that workers are being asked to
shoulder more of the rising cost of healthcare. But employers are also trying to build a healthier (i.e. less
expensive) workforce, and aspects of that trend are disturbing. Who defines what constitutes health, or how
best to achieve it? Can medical privacy laws be adequately enforced? How deeply might a company peer into a
person's private life to find unhealthy habits? Rising health costs are pushing employers into gray areas of
civil liberties. Americans should be alert.
Jobs and joblessness on the Gulf Coast
Format: Editorial
Source: New York Times
Date: November 2, 2005
Widespread unemployment from
Katrina is as much a national disaster as the destruction of infrastructure. The afflicted states simply can't
afford to foot the whole bill--and shouldn't have to. In the months since Katrina, plans to increase
unemployment aid have flitted across Congress's legislative radar screen, only to vanish as Republican
lawmakers prepare to push a $70 billion tax cut package, much of it to benefit millionaire investors. As they
did with the Davis-Bacon law, government leaders have to turn back from their wrongheaded pursuits and do the
right things instead--and, preferably, soon.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Jonathan Tasini, TomPaine.com
Date: October 25, 2005
It
is a measure of our lowered expectations, fueled by media spin, that people shrugged and seemed to think that
it was inevitable that workers for General Motors were destined to have their health care coverage slashed. But
let's be clear: the loss of benefits for GM workers was not inevitable. The moral and economic need for a
universal health care system has been well-known for a very long time. The only question now is: How many
companies will have to go belly up and how many more millions of workers will face bankruptcy and illness
because we allow ideology--the deification of the so-called free market--to triumph over common sense?
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Beth Shulman, TomPaine.com
Date: October 24, 2005
America
is not so poor that we should have to choose between food stamps or Medicaid and Katrina recovery. Close down
the tax breaks for the wealthy and use the additional funds to make sure reconstruction gets done right--with
wages above the legal minimum, to attract workers and residents back to the Gulf area; with competitive bidding
for federal contracts that would give the advantage to struggling local firms and the hard-hit minority-owned
companies who most need the work; with labor conditions and safety rules to ensure that the new construction is
done right; and with full benefits so that working families who fought off Katrina and Rita don't now have to
fight off the government in trying to return to a decent life.
Mothers at work are canaries in the mine
Format: News Commentary
Source: Charlotte Fishman, Women's eNews
Date: October 19, 2005
Anyone watching a mother attempt to handle a demanding professional job is likely to be awed at the tremendous
expenditure of energy that goes into creating some balance between the needs of family and the needs of work.
They are also likely to see how shortchanged the woman's own needs are, and how she is frequently
sleep-deprived or exercise-deprived or fun-deprived. Monday, Oct. 24, is Take Back Your Time Day, celebrating
(ironically) the 65th anniversary of the enactment of the 40-hour work week. There is an emerging social
consensus that society cannot continue to absorb the social cost of parents working full time when "full time"
is defined as 80 hours a week.
Lawbreakers need not apply for seats on county boards
Format: Political Column
Source: Jeff Webb, St. Petersburg Times
Date: October 19, 2005
Volunteering to serve the public just got harder. The Hernando County [Florida] Commission
decided that everyone who applies for an opening on any of its many appointed boards must disclose if they have
ever been convicted of a crime, including misdemeanors. An applicant's rap sheet would not necessarily
preclude the County Commission from appointing, say, a rapist or drug dealer. But it's a safe bet that such a
disclosure would not be viewed favorably. If the purpose of the decision was to deter anyone who has had
trouble with the law from applying for a volunteer job, they succeeded. No one is going to allow their dirty
laundry to be aired just for the pleasure of doing a thankless job that doesn't pay.
Format: News Commentary
Source: Paul Waldman , TomPaine.com
Date: October 19, 2005
Now
that President Bush's plan for partial privatization of Social Security has been spat out of the public's
mouth in disgust and shelved indefinitely, the left has a rare victory it can savor. And one coalition,
consisting in part of those who formed Americans United to Protect Social Security, is looking to duplicate
that success on a new issue: the conservative attempt to use the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina for a new war
on the poor. A group of progressive organizations has formed the Emergency Campaign for American Priorities, a
"grassroots, grass-tops, public relations and lobbying campaign to convince Congress to stop a plan backed by
President Bush and the Republican congressional leadership that would drastically cut programs that primarily
benefit the poor and middle class to finance tax cuts that benefit only the wealthiest among us." Will they
succeed? Can progressives without any institutional power beat back yet another retrograde Republican plan? The
answer is a qualified yes, but it will be an uphill battle.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Peter Dreier, TomPaine.com
Date: October 18, 2005
Most
Americans think that federal housing assistance is a poor people's program. In fact, less than one-fourth of
all low-income Americans receive federal housing subsidies. In contrast, almost two-thirds of affluent
Americans get housing aid from Washington. Whether they admit it or not, the wealthy live in subsidized
housing. The current way we distribute housing subsidy funds is wasteful and unfair. As a nation, we have the
resources to assist the millions of poor and working-class families who cannot afford market-rate rents or home
prices. Let's stop subsidizing the rich to live in mansions and help working families achieve the American
Dream.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Paul Krugman, New York Times
Date: October 17, 2005
Delphi's
bankruptcy is a much bigger deal than your ordinary case of corporate failure and bad, self-dealing management.
If Delphi slashes wages and defaults on its pension obligations, the rest of the auto industry may well be
tempted--or forced--to do the same. That will mark the end of the era in which ordinary working Americans could
be part of the middle class. America is a much richer country than it was 30 years ago, but since the early
1970's the hourly wage of the typical worker has barely kept up with inflation. America's working middle
class has been eroding for a generation, and it may be about to wash away completely. Something must be done.
Format: Editorial
Source: Washington Post
Date: October 17, 2005
For a window on politics and all its failings, consider the current fight over pension reform. It demonstrates
the government's inability to grapple seriously with public policy--even when the case for action seems too
obvious to ignore. The story begins with the hole in the nation's defined-benefit pension plans. Rather than
keep workers happy with wage increases, which would have to be paid for with real money, financially pressed
firms often bribe them with false promises of big pensions. When these firms go bust, employees get smaller
pensions than cynical managers had promised them. And taxpayers, who guarantee pensions up to some $45,000 per
retiree, have to rescue the bankrupt pension plans.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Tamara Draut, TomPaine.com
Date: October 17, 2005
Today the new
bankruptcy laws take effect, the product of an eight-year, multimillion dollar lobbying effort by the credit
card industry. Proponents of the law claimed their goal was to crack down on deadbeat debtors. The rise of
credit card debt, particularly among low- and middle-income families, is a troubling indicator of the current
and future well-being of average, hard-working Americans. Families are using credit cards to cope with rising
costs, stagnant incomes and the lack of alternative safety nets--all problems that should be more worthy of
Congressional attention than punishing this mythological deadbeat debtor.
Format: Editorial
Source: New York Times
Date: October 14, 2005
Communities all over the
country are trying desperately to deal with what is really an immense national problem. Only Washington can
untangle an immigration mess that draws a growing number of illegal immigrants across the nation's borders
every year. Many of these immigrants are actually risking their lives to take on the jobs that many Americans
have chosen to avoid. Only a comprehensive plan can address this national issue. Such a plan needs to secure
the borders, but it must also establish a guest worker program that serves industry, American workers and
immigrants. And it needs to deal humanely and fairly with the 11 million immigrants who are already here
illegally.
Format: Editorial
Source: New York Times
Date: October 13, 2005
The automobile industry
appears poised to follow the steel companies and the airlines as the latest to jeopardize the security of
retirees. Whether they know it or not, taxpayers may be left holding the bag. The federal Pension Benefit
Guaranty Corporation had a $23.3 billion deficit last year, and pensions nationally have $450 billion less on
deposit than they need to meet their obligations. A huge bailout looms on the horizon.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: William Greider, The Nation
Date: October 13, 2005
The country is overloaded
now with explosive political preoccupations, too many to keep straight, but there is one more potential
disaster lurking behind the headlines--the economy. Not to worry, say the newspapers. The White House assures
us the Bush economy is going great. The Federal Reserve agrees. Meanwhile, back in the real world, the economic
news is not cooperating with the official optimism. Folks in the bottom half of the economy are already
squeezed hard. They will be bloodied and bankrupt if economic policy inadvertently induces a recession. There
are ominous signs.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Max B. Sawicky, TomPaine.com
Date: October 13, 2005
With
the death of his Social Security privatization scheme, President Bush is trying to resuscitate his domestic
agenda with an electric slide to tax reform. Some things never change: doubtless, Bush will try to continue
comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted by shifting the tax burden from the wealthy to everyone
else. How he will try and do it this time around remains to be seen. The next shoe to drop will be the report
of his Advisory Commission on Tax Reform.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe
Date: October 12, 2005
Laura Bush yesterday praised Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers by
saying: "I know Harriet well. I know how accomplished she is. I know how many times she's broken the glass
ceiling herself." It [is] ironic that she invoked the glass ceiling while her husband's administration has
quietly stopped collecting detailed information on women in the workforce. In August, the Bureau of Labor
Statistics discontinued its women worker employment series in the current employment statistics payroll survey.
The women worker employment series ensured the most detailed monthly snapshots and long-term trends on the
number of women workers in individual industries.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Harold Meyerson, Washington Post
Date: October 12, 2005
With the bankruptcy filing Saturday of Delphi, the largest American auto parts
manufacturer, the downward ratcheting of living standards that has afflicted the steel and airline industries
hit the auto industry big-time. In the face of the combined onslaught of globalization, de-unionization and
deregulation, the bottom may not be falling out of the American economy, but the middle certainly is. The very
notion of a decently paid working-class job has become a defining oxymoron of our time. So we level downward,
and the normal workings of the economy seem powerless to stop it.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Jonathan Tasini, TomPaine.com
Date: October 7, 2005
Whenever I read the newest figures on the rise of the Gross Domestic Product, I'm reminded of the wise words
of 19th Century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who said that there are, "Lies, damn lies and
statistics." If we're trying to figure out what's happening to the average person, we're looking at the
wrong indicators. People feel that something very bad is happening in their lives, even if they can't pull
together all the economic strands to form a coherent explanation. They are reacting to real, on-the-ground
facts that aren't reflected by the GDP because that measure only tells us that stuff is being made and sold.
It doesn't tell us who is benefiting from all that activity.
Format: News Commentary
Source: Beth Shulman, TomPaine.com
Date: October 5, 2005
One of the
first decisions to face new Chief Justice John Roberts will be whether the super-profitable Tyson Foods must
pay its poultry processing workers for the time it takes them to walk from putting on their required
body-length aprons, work gloves, arm guards and hairnets to the production line. The issue revolves around the
definition of the "principal activity" of the workers. Is donning all the protective gear part of what they do
to earn their paychecks? The wider question, however, is what is going on here? The nation's highest court is
being asked to worry about a few minutes of walking time when poultry plant conditions look only a little
better than the Chicago stockyards did in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: E.J. Graff, TomPaine.com
Date: October 5, 2005
You can
almost set your watch by it. Every year or two, the elite media declare yet again that feminism is dead, and
that most women yearn to stay at home and tend babies. This focus on women's "choices" masks a far more
profound story. The real trend isn't choice; it's the lack thereof. Most women have to work, because they and
their families need the paycheck. But they're also treated unfairly on the job. They're underpaid,
underpromoted and unwillingly sidelined if they have kids. Try talking to actual working mothers, and you'll
find that many say their choices were not freely made. Rather, one day, they looked up and realized they'd
been "mommy-tracked" against their will.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Nancy Cauthen, TomPaine.com
Date: September 30, 2005
In the wake of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, we suddenly have national leaders talking about
poverty. So what can be done? We need a bold agenda that supports working families so that parents can once
again aspire to providing their children with a better future. This means addressing stagnating wages and
families' need for workplace flexibility. It means improving public education--including integrating our
schools not just across race and ethnic lines but also across income--and increasing access to higher ed. It
means figuring out how to make decent housing, health care and child care affordable for all. It means
rebuilding our public institutions and national infrastructure.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Thomas Palley, TomPaine.com
Date: September 29, 2005
The
Stolper-Samuelson theorem says when a rich capital-abundant country (such as the United States) trades with a
poor labor-abundant country (such as China), wages in the rich country fall and profits go up. For the last two
decades, U.S. policy makers have worked assiduously to create a global market place in which goods and capital
are free to move. Over the same period, two and a half billion people in China, India, Eastern Europe and the
former Soviet Union have discarded economic isolationism and joined the global economy. Now, these two tectonic
shifts are coming together in the form of a "super-sized" Stolper-Samuelson effect, and they stand to have
depressing consequences for American workers.
Bush's path of devastation through workers' rights
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Robyn Blumner, Tribune Media Services, Salt Lake Tribune
Date: September 25, 2005
It is a fantasy to think that the bulk of poverty-stricken African-Americans who landed in the fetid
Superdome--men and women who didn't even own a car to get out of the hurricane's path--will return to their
former communities, take out a government-guaranteed loan and start a company. Forty percent of Ninth Ward
residents over 18 don't have a high school diploma. What the returning evacuees will need is good jobs. Jobs
with wages that allow them to buy a home. Jobs that provide health benefits and a retirement plan.For most
people, it is a decent job, not a small business loan, that lights the path to the security of the middle
class.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Beth Shulman, TomPaine.com
Date: September 23, 2005
The trickle-down
theory, that discredited notion that incentives and tax breaks for the rich will somehow become rising incomes
for the poor, has been trotted out again by the Bush administration as a cure for all the devastation of
Hurricane Katrina. First, let's admit that the trickle-down theory doesn't work. It has never worked. It
didn't work in the 1980s, it won't work in New Orleans, and it doesn't work for the millions of American
families who work hard but don't have the basics for a decent life. Changing the approach in New Orleans could
be a first step in living up to our ideals of valuing hard work, by ensuring that a day's honest labor earns a
basic living wage and health security.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Beth Shulman, TomPaine.com
Date: September 14, 2005
Davis-Bacon laws require federal contractors to pay laborers and mechanics at least the prevailing-wage rates
(and fringe benefits) that other similar workers in the area receive. In the cruelest irony, [President Bush
is] saying that in New Orleans--where a quarter of the city is poor, 40% of its children live in families below
the poverty level and the prevailing wage for construction labor is less than $10.00 per hour--that working
families should suffer a pay cut as they rebuild their destroyed communities. By suspending Davis-Bacon,
[President Bush is] forcing more people into the poverty we have so dramatically witnessed in the past week and
undercutting the economic recovery of these ravaged areas.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Liza Featherstone, The Nation
Date: September 13, 2005
When Katrina hit,
most of us were stunned by the poverty of government response at all levels. Thank goodness, then, for
Wal-Mart, which immediately sent 1,900 truckloads of water and other emergency supplies to the afflicted. The
company has also contributed $17 million to the hurricane relief effort, and more than $3 million in
merchandise. There is no reason Wal-Mart could not operate in an equally streamlined, well-organized manner to
make sure that labor laws (on overtime, child labor, discrimination) are followed. There is no reason its
impressive resources could not be marshaled to remedy the daily, ongoing disaster that so many of its workers
face: low wages and inadequate healthcare.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Bill Fletcher, Jr., TomPaine.com
Date: September 9, 2005
The capitalism of the contemporary era shares many of the same values informing the builders of the Titanic;
the poor are not the responsibility of society at large. For decades, this nation's economic policies have
created a widening gap in personal wealth, making it impossible for many Americans to achieve economic security
no matter how hard they work. The (largely unionized) jobs that provided opportunities for workers to climb out
of poverty have been disappearing. In their place are low-wage service jobs, part-time employment or nothing at
all. Through directing tax cuts to serve the rich and powerful, the steerage compartments of the good ship
‘Gulf Coast' were created. All that was needed to create total devastation was a collision with an iceberg.
There simply were not enough lifeboats, because those in steerage were just not that relevant.
Labor Day 2005: no human rights in the workplace
Format: Op-Ed
Source: James C. Harrington, Lone Star Iconoclast
Date: September 6, 2005
On the day created to honor American workers' contributions to the country, we should consider
whether the following should be basic human rights, or merely privileges granted at the whim of the monied
class: the right to work; the free choice of employment; just wages and conditions of work; the right to form
and join trade unions for protection; the right to rest and leisure, reasonable working hours and periodic
holidays with pay; a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of individuals and families,
including medical care; and, security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, or old
age.
Format: Editorial
Source: Washington Post
Date: September 6, 2005
The Census Bureau's annual report on income, poverty and health insurance in the United States is not
alarming--but neither is it cheering, or even reassuring. Rather, the numbers underscore the lagging and uneven
nature of the economic recovery since the 2001 recession. According to the new data, 4 million more people were
living in poverty in 2004 than in 2001, and 4.6 million more people lacked health insurance. In the wake of
this data and Hurricane Katrina, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was wise to postpone this week's planned
vote to repeal the estate tax. Lawmakers need to remember in the weeks to come that this is an economic
recovery that continues to leave too many Americans behind.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Greg LeRoy, TomPaine.com
Date: September 6, 2005
As we celebrate
Labor Day, let's remember: America's labor unions are key watchdogs against corporate tax-and-job scams.
Companies that get huge subsidies routinely fail to create as many jobs as they promised. Indeed, many actually
lay people off, outsource jobs offshore, pay poverty wages and fail to provide health care. Labor's strong
support for corporate accountability on jobs and taxes benefits all taxpayers, most of whom are not union
members. But then, unions have always advocated for the good of all working families. If you like Social
Security, Medicare, free public education and your weekends, thank your local unions this Labor Day. And join
their coalitions for more reforms in the coming year!
Format: Editorial
Source: New York Times
Date: September 1, 2005
Income inequality is an
economic and social ill, but the administration and the Congressional majority don't seem to recognize that.
When Congress returns from its monthlong summer vacation next week, two of the leadership's top priorities
include renewing the push to repeal the estate tax, which affects only the wealthiest of families, and
extending the tax cuts for investment income, which flow largely to the richest Americans. At the other end of
the spectrum, lawmakers have stubbornly refused to raise the minimum wage: $5.15 an hour since 1997. They will
also be taking up proposals for deep budget cuts in programs that ameliorate income inequality, like Medicaid,
food stamps and federal student loans. They should be ashamed of themselves.
The uninsured: 45.8 million and counting...
Format: News Commentary
Source: Karen Davenport, Mother Jones
Date: August 31, 2005
For
the fourth year in a row, the number of Americans living without health insurance has increased. The Census
Bureau estimates that 45.8 million Americans did not have health insurance during 2004. The last time our
nation seriously engaged on this issue, "only" 40 million Americans lacked health care coverage. This isn't an
accidental crisis. Through a combination of tax provisions, entitlement programs and public commitments, we
rely on a jerry-rigged system. At the same time, we are unable to exert serious influence on health care costs,
thus placing a growing burden on those lucky enough to have coverage, while the price of health insurance
dampens employers' willingness to create new jobs. What can be done?
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Beth Shulman, TomPaine.com
Date: August 29, 2005
The
idea that corporations should have total discretion in how to treat their workers is a growing and retrograde
trend in America. The role of government is to promote the general welfare, and that includes leveling the
economic playing field so corporations can compete on the basis of their productivity and creativity, not on
who can impoverish the most workers. If we as a society don't determine the rules of their game, corporations
will write their own. Do we really want to leave it up to Enron or Wal-Mart to determine whether work will
provide the basics of a decent life? Today the state's role is even more critical, for corporations are
pushing more and more risk onto the American labor force.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Paul Krugman, New York Times
Date: August 26, 2005
American
families don't care about G.D.P. They care about whether jobs are available, how much those jobs pay and how
that pay compares with the cost of living. Recent G.D.P. growth has failed to produce exceptional gains in
employment, while wages for most workers haven't kept up with inflation. You may ask where economic growth is
going, if it isn't showing up in wages. It's going to corporate profits, to rising health care costs and to a
surge in the salaries and other compensation of executives. This is an economic expansion that hasn't trickled
down; many people are worse off than they were a year ago. And it will take more than a revamped administration
sales pitch to make people feel better.
Lawsuits won't break that glass ceiling
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Susan E. Reed, Washington Post
Date: August 21, 2005
How about those working women? Suing companies, lobbying bosses, networking nonstop with
other women, taking on the workplaces that have kept them down. It seems the women of today will stop at
nothing to try to get ahead in the workplace battle of the sexes. And yet, where does it get them? Women
comprise nearly half of full-time workers and half of managers, but they are only 16% of corporate officers and
barely 1% of CEOs in the nation's richest 500 companies. Why can't they improve those rates? After reporting
on their maneuvers for several years now, I've concluded that these warriors are using the wrong weapons to
get ahead.
Achieving gender equality mostly women's work
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Courier-Post
Date: August 21, 2005
Blatant gender discrimination in U.S. employment may be rare in these times. But women still
struggle with subtle sexism at work that can hold them back and with family responsibilities that fall more
heavily on their shoulders and sometimes hold them down. About 55% of working women have children at home. For
the amazing few who excel at balancing work and home, they still bump up against a double-paned glass ceiling
that prevents them from joining their male colleagues at the top of most corporations. Former U.S. Labor
Secretary Alexis Herman said recently that subtle sexism and child rearing may be the most difficult barriers
to equality for women to overcome. But they're not intractable.
A strike is a rarity these days
Format: Political Column
Source: Edward Lotterman, Pioneer Press
Date: August 18, 2005
We are in a labor environment where strikes that barely would have made the front page 50 years ago
now are national news. This has varied effects on society. Whether these results are good or bad depends on the
values of the beholder. What is clear is that the "rules of the game" have changed substantially, and these
changes play a role in the decline in strikes. In general, comparisons between countries and over time show
that economies where union power is limited tend to have somewhat faster economic growth. Such economies also
tend to have more unequal income distribution and harsher working conditions. How you value this apparent
trade-off depends on your political views.
As workers' rights erode, unions are fighting back
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Rick Bender, Seattle Times
Date: August 18, 2005
In a Big Brother ruling that is a slap in the face to American workers, the National Labor Relations
Board [ruled] that a boss can direct employees not to "fraternize on duty or off duty." It's a sad fact that
the Bill of Rights has never been applied inside the workplace. Organized labor has always questioned this lack
of freedom for American workers. Despite the recent "doom and gloom" media coverage of organized labor, it's
important for the public to understand that union membership is actually increasing and that unions are working
on new ways to reach out to workers who need the higher wages and decent health-care benefits that a union
brings.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Greg Tarpinian, TomPaine.com
Date: August 11, 2005
U.S. automakers would like to blame benefit costs for the financial crisis they have been courting for two
decades. Health benefits, including retiree benefits, are simply wages delivered in a different form or
deferred for payment later. The U.S. automakers are now pressing for the equivalent of a wage cut for its union
workers and take-backs from its retirees. The Bush administration can preside over the dissolution of what
remains of the U.S. auto industry or it can take the first steps toward a national solution for the health care
cost crisis that is distorting labor markets, driving down disposable income, leaving millions of Americans
without health care and creating the largest competitive disadvantage that U.S. companies now face.
The birthday Bush wants to ignore
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Jonathan Tasini, TomPaine.com
Date: August 11, 2005
It's got to be tough when people ignore your birthday. But it must add insult to injury to
have the very same people who are your legal guardians spread rumors about your health and forecast your
demise. Social Security [has] its 70th anniversary this Sunday. Yep, that grand ol' dame has been around a
long time, keeping old people out of poverty. And, over the years, Democratic and Republican administrations
have all marked significant Social Security milestones with public events and proclamations. But not this White
House gang. It isn't just the lack of recognition that is galling. It's the willful twisting of information
and the use of a government agency to manipulate the public's perception of Social Security.
Big Brother on and off the job
Format: Political Column
Source: Harold Meyerson, Washington Post
Date: August 10, 2005
On June 7 the board that regulates employer-employee relations in the United States handed
down a remarkable ruling. They upheld the legality of a regulation for uniformed employees at a security guard
company that reads, "You must NOT...fraternize on duty or off duty, date or become overly friendly with the
client's employees or with co-employees." There's a word for the kind of employer-employee relationship that
the NLRB has just sanctioned. It's "feudal." But then the Bill of Rights in America has never reached very far
into the workplace. So as we fight to bring liberal democracy to quasi-feudal backwaters in distant lands, we
might remember that the fight for individual rights in the American workplace--and now, beyond it--is itself a
long way from a victorious conclusion.
Format: Editorial
Source: (Editorial), New York Times
Date: August 6, 2005
If you look behind
the headline number, the jobs picture--and what it says about the economy--is considerably more nuanced. The
average monthly job creation so far this year comes to 191,000. That's enough to absorb the 150,000 or so new
workers who enter the labor force each month, and then some. Still, it's not robust. Employment rates--the
share of the population that is employed, broken down by groups--tell a similar story. Because the demand for
workers has been subpar for some four years now, wages have suffered. The 207,000 new jobs [in July] are a boon
to the people who landed them. But American workers are not yet in a position of strength.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Marcia D. Greenberger, Judy Waxman, TomPaine.com
Date: August 4, 2005
It's no secret that low-income, working Americans are being forced to make the biggest
sacrifices as the federal and state governments look for ways to cut spending while preserving tax cuts for the
wealthy. Programs that improve quality of life for the poor are all too often the first on the chopping block.
This year is no exception. Medicaid is the subject of cuts on both the state and federal levels. Too many
politicians would rather blame Medicaid than address the larger issues of soaring health care costs and fewer
good jobs that provide health insurance. It is no coincidence that more Americans are relying on Medicaid as
the economy has weakened and as fewer employers are sponsoring health insurance.
Format: Editorial
Source: (Editorial), New York Times
Date: August 4, 2005
The National Rifle
Association is urging a boycott of a major energy company that dares to protect its employees from gunplay in
the workplace. ConocoPhillips ran afoul of the NRA when it joined in a challenge to a law passed by the
Oklahoma Legislature that would strip businesses of their gun-control rights on company property. The state gun
lobby jumped on the issue after a dozen workers were fired at a paper mill for violating a ban on keeping guns
in their cars parked in company lots. Responsible corporations sued, pointing out that they are liable for
workers' safety. They cited estimates that more than a dozen killings occur each week in the nation's
workplaces because angry employees are able to put their hands on guns.
Format: Editorial
Source: New York Times
Date: August 3, 2005
When trying to explain United
Airlines' recent pension default, various analysts and assorted lawmakers often use the phrase "perfect
storm," suggesting that an unstoppable combination of impersonal economic forces blindsided the carrier. It's
a faulty metaphor. Some of United's problems may have been due to avoidable waste and human greed. Congress
should take heed, for the sake of the 44 million American workers who are covered by pensions similar to
United's. Congress and the Labor Department, which oversees the federal pension agency, should swiftly
investigate allegations of conflicts of interest and, if warranted, seek redress for bilked workers and
retirees. Rather than a perfect storm, the United pension debacle may be the tip of an iceberg.
Format: Editorial
Source: New York Times
Date: August 1, 2005
With an estimated 11 million
people in the country illegally, immigration is too big for the White House to ignore. If there is debate
within the Bush administration about where immigration reform should go, there are several proposals that
deserve consideration. As Washington circles this tough issue, problems with immigration only grow. Almost
500,000 immigrants a year pour over the border to take backbreaking unskilled jobs that Americans don't want.
The United States offers about one legal visa for every 100 workers who sneak into the country. But without
that work force, the economy would sour. So we are left with an inhumane system, with jobs available to whoever
can break into the country to get them.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Matthew Dowd, New York Times
Date: August 1, 2005
With nearly six
million Mexicans living illegally in the United States, some Americans are greatly worried about the costs of
illegal immigration and have demanded that more be done to stem it. But chances are there will be a substantial
decrease in illegal immigration from Mexico in the next 20 years, and it won't be because of civilian border
patrols, laws being passed, [or]pronouncements by politicians. Instead, the cause will be demographic trends
within Mexico itself, trends that have been largely ignored in the debate over immigration. We should be aware
of the historic transformations occurring in Mexican society so that we aren't fighting a war that is already
ending.
Format: Editorial
Source: Washington Post
Date: July 31, 2005
Should Congress care about the decline of unions? In some ways, they shouldn't. If unions fail to convince
workers that it's worth signing up and paying dues, they don't deserve to remain in business. But it's
essential, in a free society, that unions should get a chance to make their case, and the decision on whether
to join must belong with the workers. This is where there is a legitimate concern for policymakers. Employers
can block union attempts to organize by using tactics that are illegal or at least undesirable. Congress needs
to revisit the law to make it tougher on employers. In a modern economy, unions may be destined to dwindle. But
the dwindling should reflect free choices of workers, not intimidation.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Jonathan Tasini, TomPaine.com
Date: July 29, 2005
Enough is enough. The 15 so-called Democrats who voted for the Central American Free Trade Agreement must pay
a heavy price for turning their backs on labor: none of them should receive a dime from labor unions and each
one should face a labor-backed primary challenger next year. If the CAFTA 15 do not suffer the political
consequences for their vote, labor will look weak and the march of so-called "free trade" will continue. To
overlook a politician's vote on trade means turning a blind eye to the legislative tool most responsible for
shifting the power of self-determination from the hands of citizens to the corporate boardrooms of global
capitalism.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Mark Gaffney, Battle Creek Enquirer
Date: July 27, 2005
The U.S. lost 900,000 jobs and job opportunities due to NAFTA, which
devoted page upon page to safeguarding corporate interests, but left workers' interests with no protections at
all. In Michigan, NAFTA destroyed close to 100,000 jobs from 1993 to 2002. Now the Bush administration wants to
dig the hole even deeper with the Central American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA's little brother. CAFTA would
extend to Central America the disastrous job loss and increasing inequality caused by NAFTA. So-called "free
trade," under the rules crafted by corporate lobbyists, has devastated communities. We need to find a better
way.
Toyota pulls u-turn, heads north
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Paul Krugman, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Date: July 26, 2005
There has been fierce competition among states hoping to attract a new Toyota assembly plant. Several Southern
states reportedly offered financial incentives worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But last month Toyota
decided to put the new plant in Ontario, Canada. Canada's national health insurance system saves auto
manufacturers large sums in benefit payments compared with their costs in the United States. Funny, isn't it?
Pundits tell us that the welfare state is doomed by globalization, that programs like national health insurance
have become unsustainable. But Canada's universal health insurance system is handling international
competition just fine. It's our own system, which penalizes companies that treat their workers well, that's
in trouble.
Labor's big split: pain before gain
Format: News Commentary
Source: Harold Meyerson, Washington Post
Date: July 26, 2005
Yesterday's announcement by the Service Employees International Union and the
International Brotherhood of Teamsters that they were quitting the AFL-CIO was no less stunning for its absence
of theatricals. What we know is that the split--which is likely to grow as several other unions announce their
own disaffiliations over the next couple of weeks--sunders a union movement that is already weaker than it has
been since the 1920s. What we don't know is whether the new organization that the SEIU, the Teamsters and
their allies will form in the coming months can and will do anything to bolster the power of America's
indispensable, if enfeebled, labor movement. For now, it's a lot easier to see the damage than it is to
foresee the gain.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Jonathan Tasini, TomPaine.com
Date: July 14, 2005
One of the enduring myths of the American Dream is that if you just work hard, you will eventually reap your
economic reward and get ahead. But a startling, relatively ignored, shift has taken place that bears the seeds
of an economic and political earthquake. For decades, workers' wages were tied to productivity. The idea was
simple: when workers produce more--either tangible products or services--in an hour of work than before, they
are being more efficient and, usually, that means more profit for a corporation. Historically, increased
efficiency flowed to workers in the form of higher wages. Not anymore. The link between productivity gains and
wages has been broken.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Greg LeRoy, TomPaine.com
Date: July 8, 2005
When
governments use eminent domain to assemble land for a redevelopment project, they frequently ladle on many
other subsidies--the average state allows jobs to be subsidized 30 different ways. The total value of such
packages routinely exceeds $100,000 per job created. Yet a mountain of evidence demonstrates that subsidized
companies fail to deliver on projected economic benefits. Many have failed to create or retain as many jobs as
they promised. Others pay poverty wages or fail to provide health care. Some have not created any new jobs, or
actually laid people off. Some are even outsourcing jobs offshore. At the root of the problem is a
corporate-controlled definition of "competition" that obscures cause and effect.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Lee Drutman, TomPaine.com
Date: July 7, 2005
After
far too many months of watching President Bush ramble around the American heartland in his folksy
"Strengthening Social Security" medicine show tour, actual bills are finally making the rounds in important
committees, and the possibility of actual Social Security "reform" legislation lingers in the air of a hot and
steamy Washington summer. Yet despite the resounding failure to build popular support for plans of
privatization, Bush and company continue to do everything they can politically to make sure private accounts
happen. Why do they want private accounts so badly? Does understanding the prize that Republicans are after
provide the Democrats with a better political strategy than mere obstructionism?
Harassment-free workplace responsibility of bosses, workers
Format: Editorial
Source: Desert Sun
Date: July 5, 2005
Fifty-seven farmworkers empowered themselves--and others suffering similar injustices--by
publicly proclaiming allegations of harassment against their former employer. Earlier this month, they reached
a $1.05 million settlement. With nothing to gain and everything to lose, these women knowingly opened
themselves up to public scrutiny and castigation--working through the painstaking legal process in order to
reclaim the dignity they could have very easily lost forever. It's really not about the money. It is about
self-worth. These farmworkers defended their honor, and in the process, have paved the way for other
disenfranchised workers to stand up against unfair treatment in the workplace.
Format: News Commentary
Source: David Moberg, In These Times
Date: June 30, 2005
The myth of the self-made man is
American culture's own special heart of darkness, helping to explain both its infectious optimism and ruthless
greed. The idea holds enough truth and seductiveness to make it easy to forget its delusional dangers. To
reprise Marx's famous formulation, individuals, like humankind, do make their own personal history, but not
under conditions they choose. But in America, we choose to ignore the caveat about conditions at our peril.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Debra L. Ness, TomPaine.com
Date: June 17, 2005
It's a
shock to many new parents and financially devastating to others. When it comes to pregnancy and childbirth, our
nation has failed to adopt basic policies that support families. Although family-friendly policies are
beginning to make it easer for a few lucky dads to take time off from work for a new baby, change has been
painfully slow. In fact, roughly nine out of 10 private sector companies don't have paid leave for new
fathers. Americans spend more than one billion dollars each year to buy ties. This Father's Day, we should be
giving fathers what they really need: paid leave with their new babies. The benefits of paid parental leave are
a win for families, employers and communities.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Paul Krugman, New York Times
Date: June 10, 2005
In the 1960's
America was a place in which very few people were extremely wealthy, many blue-collar workers earned wages that
placed them comfortably in the middle class, and working families could expect steadily rising living standards
and a reasonable degree of economic security. But that was another country. The middle-class society I grew up
in no longer exists. Why? Middle-class America didn't emerge by accident. It was created by what has been
called the Great Compression of incomes that took place during World War II, and sustained for a generation by
social norms that favored equality, strong labor unions and progressive taxation. Since the 1970's, all of
those sustaining forces have lost their power.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Lee Drutman, TomPaine.com
Date: June 10, 2005
This past
week, leaders of Delta and Northwest told a Senate panel that they didn't have the money to cover the pensions
of 150,000 workers and retirees, and that they'd probably go bankrupt on account of it. If so, they would join
their troubled competitors, U.S. Airways and United, who also broke their pension promises to thousands of
employees and then turned to the government to cover at least part of the difference. These pension failures
come on the heels of the speedy nomination of free-market ideologue and corporate sycophant Christopher Cox to
the [Securities and Exchange Commission]. Though the two events are unconnected on the surface, both bode
poorly for the ability of hard-working Americans to enjoy an adequate retirement.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Bob Herbert, New York Times
Date: June 6, 2005
The war that
nobody talks about--the overwhelmingly one-sided class war--is being waged all across America. Guess who's
winning. The gap between the rich and everybody else in this country is fast becoming an unbridgeable chasm.
Put the myth of the American Dream aside. The bottom line is that it's becoming increasingly difficult for
working Americans to move up in class. The rich are freezing nearly everybody else in place, and sprinting off
with the nation's bounty. As far as the Bush administration is concerned, the gap between the rich and the
rest of us is not growing fast enough. A big problem, of course, is that American workers have been hurting
badly for years.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Jonathan Tasini, TomPaine.com
Date: May 31, 2005
With very little public outcry, we are letting corporate America dismantle the private defined-benefit pension
system. At the same time, huge salary and pension benefits are lavished on executives. Remember, pensions are
deferred compensation--people put off getting money in their paychecks today because of a promise that they
would receive a specific amount of money later. It's their money, not the companies' money. The private
pension was a fundamental pillar of the American middle-class dream: If you saved now, you could still have a
middle-class life in retirement, and you wouldn't have to gamble in the stock market to do so.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Harley Shaiken, TomPaine.com
Date: May 31, 2005
As the United States Congress begins to debate the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement
(DR-CAFTA), a titanic struggle between the forces of free trade and protectionism promises to unfold. But that
debate should not be allowed to mask the truth behind this treaty: the DR-CAFTA is more a pleading of special
interests than a free-trade deal. It manages simultaneously to fleece the people of six poor countries and to
put U.S. workers in harm's way. The agreement opens trade while locking in a status quo that is appalling.
Workers face everything from rampant discrimination against older people to physical abuse, lack of bathroom
breaks, no overtime pay and poverty wages.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Matt Miller, New York Times
Date: May 25, 2005
It's hardly news
that the issue vexing talented people is the struggle to balance their professional lives with time for
fulfilling lives outside of work. The shock is that after decades of wrestling with these tradeoffs, the
obvious answer is the one everyone has been too skeptical or afraid to explore: changing the way top jobs are
structured. In a world where most people are struggling, the search for "balance" in high-powered jobs has to
be counted a luxury. Still, there is something telling (if not downright dysfunctional) when a society's most
talented people feel they have to sacrifice the meaningful relationships every human craves as the price of
exercising their talent.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: J. Bradford DeLong, TomPaine.com
Date: May 24, 2005
Most
academic economics rely on concepts laid down at the beginning of the 20th century by the British economist
Alfred Marshall. The central bias of this toolkit is that we should trust the market to solve the problems we
set it, and that we should not expect small (or even large) changes to have huge effects. A technological leap
that raises the wages of the skilled and educated will induce others to become skilled and educated, restoring
balance so that inequality does not grow too much. We live today in an extraordinarily unequal world.
Marshall's economics--the equilibrium economics of comparative statics, of shifts in supply and demand curves,
and of accommodating responses--is of almost no help in accounting for this.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: John Teirney, New York Times
Date: May 24, 2005
Suppose you
could eliminate the factors often blamed for the shortage of women in high-paying jobs. Suppose that promotions
and raises did not depend on pleasing sexist male bosses or putting in long nights and weekends away from home.
Would women make as much as men? Interviews and experiments convinced researchers Muriel Niederle of Stanford
and Lise Vesterlund of the University of Pittsburgh that the gender gap wasn't due mainly to women's
insecurities about their abilities. It was due to different appetites for competition. Whatever the cause, it
helps explain why men set up the traditional corporate ladder as one continual winner-take-all competition--and
why that structure no longer makes sense.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Paul Krugman, New York Times
Date: May 23, 2005
After
November's election, the victors claimed a mandate to unravel the welfare state. But the national election was
about who would best defend us from gay married terrorists. At the state level, voters sent a message that they
wanted a stronger, not weaker, social safety net. There's a very good reason: they need that net more than
ever. Over the past 25 years the lives of working Americans have become ever less secure. Jobs come without
health insurance; 401(k)'s vanish; corporations default on their pension obligations; workers lose their jobs
more often, and unemployment lasts much longer than it used to.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Gar Alperovitz, TomPaine.com
Date: May 23, 2005
New policies may be largely blocked by conservative control at the national level, but there are reasons to
believe a new approach can build power at the state and local level. This is where the pain of Bush era fiscal
problems, spending cut-backs and job dislocations are felt directly. Moreover, just below the radar of most
media attention, innovative progressive community-benefitting "ownership strategies" have been developing at
the state and local level for the last several decades. Many have been fine-tuned through trial and error
experimentation and are ready to be put forward in a politically exciting form. One of the most important
involves employee-owned companies that both alter who owns wealth and helps stabilize the local economy.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Rich Benjamin, TomPaine.com
Date: May 19, 2005
The Apprentice fueled infectious bouts of luxury fever, exposed class envy and revived some stubborn
myths about upward mobility in America. Earning a college education is increasingly vital, but access to higher
education is declining for poor and working-class Americans. The Apprentice mocks the ground truths
surrounding educational opportunity and upward mobility in America. Remarkable recent studies find that class
mobility in America has been on the decline since the 1970s, and now stagnates. It's as if this season were
staged to reassure the Anxious Class that attaining a college degree was superfluous to its life chances.
That's the kick behind its perverse, timely appeal.
A steeper ladder for the have-nots
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe
Date: May 18, 2005
Americans believed that none of the inequalities long endured by the
poor (because it's all their fault, right?) would seep into our lives. We were wrong. With suburban schools
slashing their budgets, healthcare costs rising, [and] retirement funds in doubt, the nation is sliding into a
dangerous place. A quarter century of a ''mine, all mine" ethos continues to work for CEOs and the upper
class. The rest of America finds the ladder taller and steepening. It is no wonder why politicians who protect
the wealthy scream ''class warfare" every time someone talks about inequity. It is a diversion to keep those
who vote against their own interests from realizing they are victims of friendly fire.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Dan Carpenter, Indianapolis Star
Date: May 18, 2005
What would Jesus do about low wages and lousy working conditions in a land of
plenty? He told us what he'd do, says the Rev. Darren Cushman Wood, a minister, labor history teacher and
community activist who's published a book with the most telling title, "Blue Collar Jesus." Pushing back
against the anti-union tide that is sweeping over the body politic and much of the body of Christ, Wood
endeavors to show that livable pay, dignity and leisure for working people are both scriptural imperatives and
economic necessities--whether church and business leaders recognize it or not.
The media's Social Security deception
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Mark Weisbrot, TomPaine.com
Date: May 18, 2005
A candid note from the media is in order for their misreporting of President Bush's effort to
change Social Security. Here is what an honest confession might look like: "We apologize for having failed our
listeners and readers in our reporting on Social Security. The extent of this failure can be clearly measured
by the public's complete misunderstanding of the problem being discussed. A recent poll found that 68% of
Americans under 44 think they won't even get a benefit from Social Security. Where did Americans get the idea
that they would get nothing from Social Security? They got it from us. We hope you will forgive our sloppy,
careless reporting on Social Security."
Sick leave flexibility for families, businesses
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Lisa Pohlmann, Bangor Daily News
Date: May 17, 2005
The work force has
changed, and the workplace must change as well. The need for flexible sick leave is acute. There are many
families whose lives are disrupted, economically and otherwise, by their employer's failure to offer them even
the most minimal flexibility in their sick leave benefit. But this is not just an issue for low-income
families. Maine has a critical shortage of highly skilled workers, which is forcing businesses to rethink their
recruitment and retention strategies. Workers value family friendly policies more than almost every other
workplace benefit. The flexible use of sick leave is one basic benefit that workers are increasingly demanding.
Flexible leave for family care is good for the business bottom line.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Tim McFeeley, TomPaine.com
Date: May 17, 2005
Last
week, Minnesota became the seventh state in two years to increase the minimum wage, and three other states are
poised to continue this trend in the coming weeks. In fact, a higher minimum wage is becoming standard policy
across the United States. Sixteen states now set a minimum wage greater than the federal level of $5.15 per
hour. This is a terrific political opportunity for progressives. Quite simply, our national and state
governments are moving in opposite directions. By fulfilling their role as "laboratories of democracy," states
are proving that progressive policies are both feasible and popular, offering powerful ammunition for future
national political battles. For progressives, hope is in the states.
Cleaning up the laundry industry
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Mary Beth Maxwell, TomPaine.com
Date: May 16, 2005
Earlier this month, hundreds of hospitals and the patients they serve came close to working
without clean linens. A strike was threatened and postponed but still looms because of ongoing contract
negotiations and labor disputes between the nation's largest hospital laundry supplier, Angelica Textile
Services, and its employees represented by the union UNITE HERE. When it comes to our schools, our communities
and our country, we expect to have a voice. The workplace should be no different. Unfortunately, because of
weak labor laws and employers who skirt the law, workers are routinely denied the opportunity to form a union
and are often retaliated against for exercising their rights. It doesn't have to be this way.
Comment: to boost workers, turn down CAFTA
Format: News Commentary
Source: Linda Chavez-Thompson, San Antonio Express-News
Date: May 15, 2005
The North American Free Trade Agreement has cost U.S. workers nearly 900,000 jobs
and job opportunities. The agreement was supposed to open markets for American goods and services, creating
high-paying jobs at home and prosperity abroad. But the opposite has occurred. We can expect NAFTA's
successor, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA, to have similar--if not worse--effects. CAFTA,
like NAFTA, will sell out America's jobs while doing nothing to pull people out of poverty in Central America.
Under CAFTA rules, multinational corporations will speed up their race to the bottom when it comes to wages and
workplace protections, driving workers further into exploitation.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Max B. Sawicky, TomPaine.com
Date: May 13, 2005
Economists say workers' compensation (wages plus fringe benefits) depends on productivity. The more workers
produce, the more bosses will pay. But economists can be wrong, and this is one of those times. For the past 30
years productivity has grown well ahead of compensation. The gap between what could be paid and what is paid
has gotten larger over this entire period. We are talking long-term trends here that do not depend on recent
history or the current regime, so much as the chronic disadvantage workers have had vis-à-vis employers. Not
surprisingly, less wage growth has been accompanied by more profit growth. The upshot is that prosperity isn't
trickling down very well, which you probably knew.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Paul Krugman, New York Times
Date: May 13, 2005
Last week
Standard and Poor's downgraded both Ford and General Motors bonds to junk status. That is, it sees a
significant risk that the companies won't be able to pay their debts. Don't cry for the bondholders, but do
cry for the workers. The downgrade was a reminder of how far we have come from the days when hard-working
Americans could count on a reasonable degree of economic security. In 1968, GM was a widely emulated icon of
American business. Since then, America has grown much richer, but American workers have become far less secure.
Today, Wal-Mart is America's largest corporation. Like GM in its prime, it has become a widely emulated
business icon. But there the resemblance ends.
Format: Editorial
Source: New York Times
Date: May 12, 2005
On Tuesday, when it received a
federal bankruptcy court's permission to terminate its pension plans, United Airlines became the biggest
pension defaulter in the history of corporate America. Analysts fear that Delta may also default, as well as
other ailing airlines, followed by auto parts companies and perhaps even, in five years or so, the carmakers
themselves. Sadly, it's too late to offer relief to the burned United employees. But their plight should
compel Congress to learn the right lessons and take the necessary steps to protect Americans' pensions.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Bob Herbert, New York Times
Date: May 12, 2005
A recent report
from Northeastern University tells us that the employment rate for the nation's teenagers in the first 11
months of 2004--just 36.3 percent--was the lowest it has ever been since the federal government began tracking
teenage employment in 1948. Whatever politicians and business-booster types may be saying, the simple truth is
that there are not nearly enough jobs available for the many millions of out-of-work or underworked men and
women who need them. The wages of those who are employed are not even keeping up with inflation. Wealth and
power in the United States has become ever more dangerously concentrated, leaving an entire generation of
essentially powerless workers largely at the mercy of employers.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Kim Gandy, TomPaine.com
Date: May 10, 2005
Make no
mistake, privatizing Social Security will be financially devastating for women. Without this essential social
insurance program, more than half of women over 65 would be living in poverty. Social Security provides a
guaranteed monthly income to retired workers, to workers who become disabled and to survivors of deceased
workers. It is time-tested, extremely cost efficient and--most importantly--it works. Fortunately, the public
is becoming more skeptical, not less. We must debunk the myths and tell the whole truth, so that everyone with
an interest in this fight understands how the system works and what is at stake. As always, knowledge truly is
power.
Roses, relaxation and real reform
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Shelley Waters Boots, Mary Bissell, TomPaine.com
Date: May 6, 2005
If the cult of motherhood has taken an angry turn these days, it's easy to understand why.
Mothers (and fathers) across the country are struggling to balance the needs of their families and the demands
of their jobs. And despite our collective rhetoric on valuing families, parents are largely forced to shoulder
these burdens alone. If we really want mothers to relax, marriages to prosper and children to thrive, it's
time for the government to implement an everyday Mother's Day strategy that will make a difference for years
to come.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Martha Burk, TomPaine.com
Date: May 6, 2005
Every year on
Mother's Day we stop to thank our moms with gifts and adoration. As individuals, we love our mothers dearly,
but as a society we don't give much of a flip for motherhood. The state of mothers in America is worse than
it's ever been. Close to three-quarters of all moms with children between the ages of 6 and 18 are in the
labor force. Even though a large majority of mothers in the country now work outside the home, we are lost in
the '50s when it comes to family policy. As a nation, we've got to grasp the fact that working mothers are
the norm, not the exception.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: E. J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post
Date: May 3, 2005
There is a name for those who continue to sit at a gambling table even after they learn
that the game is fixed. They are called fools. Now that President Bush has proposed Social Security benefit
cuts through "progressive indexing," his critics are said to have an obligation to negotiate in good faith to
achieve a solution. There are just two problems with that sentence: the words "good faith" and "solution."
Walking away from a rigged game is hard for some people, especially when those running it and the respected
opinion-makers who support them insist that this time the game will truly be on the level. But, especially when
the danger involves gambling away the future of Social Security, the truly responsible thing is to leave the
table.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Beth Shulman, TomPaine.com
Date: May 3, 2005
When it
started small in Arkansas, perhaps [Wal-Mart] felt it had no choice but to create primarily low-wage jobs that
offered few benefits, to successfully compete. But isn't it high time to rethink this view? Couldn't Wal-Mart
provide family-sustaining jobs and be the General Motors of the 21st century? Wal-Mart has a decision to make
about how it wants to do business, the society it wants to help share and its legacy in America's history
books. It can either become the General Motors of the 21st century by rebuilding a strong middle class, or it
can continue to lead our country down the dangerous path to a low-wage economy. We all have a stake in its
decision. Because, like General Motors several decades ago: as goes Wal-Mart, so goes the nation.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Paul Krugman, New York Times
Date: May 2, 2005
A close look at
President Bush's proposal for "progressive price indexing" of Social Security puts the lie to claims that
it's a plan to increase benefits for the poor and cut them for the wealthy. In fact, it's a plan to slash
middle-class benefits; the wealthy would barely feel a thing. Cut an average worker's benefits, and you're
imposing real hardship. Cut or even eliminate Dick Cheney's benefits, and only his accountants will notice.
This is about ideology: Mr. Bush comes to bury Social Security, not to save it. His goal is to turn F.D.R.'s
most durable achievement into an unpopular welfare program, so some future president will be able to attack it
with tall tales about Social Security queens driving Cadillacs.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Paul Krugman, New York Times
Date: April 29, 2005
American health care is unique among advanced countries in its heavy reliance on the private sector.
It's also uniquely inefficient. We spend far more per person on health care than any other country, yet many
Americans lack health insurance and don't receive essential care. This week yet another report emphasized just
how bad a job the American system does at providing basic health care. A study by the Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation estimates that 20 million working Americans are uninsured; in Texas, which has the worst record,
more than 30 percent of the adults under 65 have no insurance. Our system is desperately in need of reform. Yet
it will be very hard to get useful reform, for two reasons: vested interests and ideology.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Paul Krugman, New York Times
Date: April 25, 2005
Is the
administration's obliviousness to the public's economic anxiety just partisanship? I don't think so:
President Bush and other Republican leaders honestly think that we're living in the best of times. After all,
everyone they talk to says so. The administration's upbeat view of the economy is a case in point. Corporate
interests are doing very well. Over the last three years, profits grew the fastest since World War II. The
story is very different for the great majority of Americans. Over the past three years, wage and salary income
grew less than in any other postwar recovery--less than a tenth as fast as profits. But wage-earning Americans
aren't part of the base.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Paul Krugman, New York Times
Date: April 22, 2005
The United
States spends far more on health care than other advanced countries. Yet we don't appear to receive more
medical services. How do we do it? We've created a vast and hugely expensive insurance bureaucracy that
accomplishes nothing. It's perverse but true that this system, which insures only 85 percent of the
population, costs much more than we would pay for a system that covered everyone. Why do we put up with such an
expensive, counterproductive health care system? Decades of indoctrination in the virtues of market competition
and the evils of big government have left many Americans unable to comprehend the idea that sometimes
competition is the problem, not the solution.
Wal-Mart's free market fallacy
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Jonathan Tasini, TomPaine.com
Date: April 21, 2005
Conservatives run around singing the praises of Wal-Mart, proclaiming it an American success
story. But what I love about Wal-Mart is the way the company highlights the phoniness of two centerpieces of
the conservative movement's sloganeering propaganda: the so-called "free market" and "local control." Truth
is, Wal-Mart could not survive in a real free market. Ironically, Wal-Mart's behavior does have one redeeming
factor. By puncturing the Wal-Mart-generated myths that it is good for America, by showing that its low-prices
come with a heavy cost, and by revealing how the company is a leech on communities, we may begin to pull back
the curtain hiding the true nature of the so-called "free market."
Think pay gap doesn't exist anymore? Think again
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Rekha Basu, Des Moines Register
Date: April 20, 2005
Imagine if your earnings for one-third of this year were simply wiped out. Say you were
furloughed from your job, or had to take a leave without pay to take care of family. Since we're already
almost a third of the way through 2005, all the work you've done so far this year would count for exactly
nothing. Now you have some sense of what it means to be the typical woman in the workforce. Tuesday was Equal
Pay Day, the symbolic date established by the National Committee on Pay Equity to show how many extra months
into the year a woman would have to work to earn as much as a man does in a year. Relative to male earnings,
the first nearly four months worked by a woman count for nothing.
A great idea--but not practiced in America
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Nancy Hurlbert, Tami Simms-Powel, Miami Herald
Date: April 19, 2005
Why do parking-lot attendants get paid more than childcare workers? Is it harder work? Does it take
more training? Is the work more valuable to society? Or is it that most parking lot attendants are men, and
most childcare workers are women? The day to ask these questions is April 19: Equal Pay Day. And here's
another question: Why April 19? If a man and a woman each started working on Jan. 1, 2004, the man would have
earned a year's pay by Dec. 31, 2004. The woman would have to continue working three months and 19 days longer
to earn the same amount. In America today, the woman's work year extends until April 19 of the next year. This
gives new meaning to the old saying: A woman's work is never done.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Paul Krugman, New York Times
Date: April 18, 2005
In the 1970's
soaring prices of oil and other commodities led to stagflation--a combination of high inflation and high
unemployment, which left no good policy options. If the Fed cut interest rates to create jobs, it risked
causing an inflationary spiral; if it raised interest rates to bring inflation down, it would further increase
unemployment. Can it happen again? Last week fears of a return to stagflation sent stock prices to a five-month
low. What few seem to have noticed, however, is that a mild form of stagflation--rising inflation in an economy
still well short of full employment--has already arrived. Inflation is creeping up, and it's doing so despite
a labor market that is in worse shape than the official unemployment rate suggests.
Format: News Commentary
Source: John Edwards, Talking Points Memo
Date: April 14, 2005
I'm now spending a lot of my time tackling the challenges of poverty, but I learned a lot about
bankruptcy on the campaign trail last year. I saw how many good families end up broke and poor, and how they
need the safety net of a fair bankruptcy law if they're going to get back on their feet. Like a lot of
Democrats, I voted for a bankruptcy reform bill before. I can't say it more simply than this: I was wrong. The
bill is supposed to crack down on irresponsible borrowers. That's the right thing to do. The problem is that
this bill imposes big burdens on families who did everything right but went broke just because they lost a job
or lost their health insurance. And, even more than the legislation I supported, this bill doesn't crack down
on the real abusers.
Struggle for workers' rights necessary
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Daniel Boudreau, BG News
Date: April 12, 2005
As the
days remaining in this academic year slip away, many soon-to-be-ex-students are pondering just what they are
going to do with their lives. I have this to suggest: go save your country. Find work within what is going to
be the major American battle of the 21st century: the fight for workers' rights and their ability to unionize.
Why not consider work that puts you at the center of this struggle, one that, when successful, will ultimately
bring some balance to an economy that currently breeds injustice? If current economic trends continue, and if
we don't step up to oppose them, that fancy college degree of yours might only be able to land you employment
at the local, non-unionized, Wal-Mart.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Beth Shulman, TomPaine.com
Date: April 12, 2005
From
yesterday's daytime gabfests to today's reality shows, somehow in America, the insurmountable became the
inevitable. We went from counting on a family-sustaining job to expecting a pink slip. We've seen whole towns
rust and millions lose decent jobs. We've seen still others trapped in jobs that fail to provide the basics of
a decent life. Meanwhile, there aren't enough reality show makeovers to transform whole blocks--let alone
entire towns--or get us all college diplomas or decent jobs. So a few are chosen, and the rest of us are made
to feel like we failed. It's one thing to admire those who beat the odds, quite another to create a society
which makes the odds nearly impossible to overcome.
Bush's Social Security playbook
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Paul Waldman, TomPaine.com
Date: April 12, 2005
The current debate over Social Security is one of those rare occasions where the public is
getting the chance to really think about what is being proposed. As poll after poll has shown, the more they
hear about the administration's proposal, the less they like it. There is little reason to believe that the
argument that privatization is really about helping poor people will be any more persuasive than the previous
arguments that it was about helping black people or young people. Unfortunately for the administration, when
people actually know the facts and take the opportunity to think things out, it can be awfully hard to pull the
wool over their eyes.
Justices split gray hairs in age-bias case
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Marianne Means, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Date: April 7, 2005
Last week the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal law allows old folks to file job-related age-bias claims
without a finding of deliberate harmful intent. Sounds good, but then the justices noted that employers could
dump older workers if they had an undefined "reasonable" explanation. Wow. An escape clause big enough to drive
a truck through. Maybe the justices have forgotten that without a remedy, there is no right. So are senior
citizens a protected class like racial minorities and women? Not on your life. This is one of those disgusting
legal dodges in which the kindly, age-neutral rhetoric doesn't come close to reality.
Drafted for the inflation battle
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Robert Reich, TomPaine.com
Date: April 7, 2005
When job growth is slow, like it is now, the poorest Americans suffer most. That's because
they're the last to get hired and the first to get fired. Now, Alan Greenspan wants to stop a possible
inflation outbreak and is raising interest rates to compensate. But inflation is highly unlikely to spiral out
of control, and the pre-emptive measures against it just mean poor Americans have fewer and fewer job options.
All the Fed is doing is widening the poverty gap. Poorer Americans are paying the price at the very time when
the White House is cutting low-income housing, cutting Medicaid for the poor, cutting child care, and cutting
other programs for poor families.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Eric Schlosser, New York Times
Date: April 6, 2005
Last month,
the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a group that represents farm workers in Florida, announced it was ending a
four-year boycott of Taco Bell. The most remarkable thing about the announcement was the reason behind it: Taco
Bell had acceded to all of the coalition's demands. At a time of declining union membership, failed organizing
drives and public apathy about poverty, a group of immigrant tomato pickers had persuaded an enormous fast food
company to increase the wages of migrant workers and impose a tough code of conduct on Florida tomato
suppliers.
The economy is based on borrowing
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Mark Trahant, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Date: April 3, 2005
The Economic Policy Institute recently compiled its "State of Working America 2004/2005" report. "Many of the
problems that beset working Americans in the 2001 recession and protracted jobless recovery persist today,"
says the opening paragraph of the report. "The 2001 downturn stopped and even reversed most of the positive
economic trends that characterized the latter 1990s." The country's wealth scale is out of balance. "Using
newly available income data that goes all the way back to 1913, income in 2000 was only slightly less
concentrated among the top 1 percent of households than during the run-up to the Great Depression, which was
the worst period of uneven income concentration in the last century," the report says.
Wal-Mart's culture of crime and greed
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Jonathan Tasini, TomPaine.com
Date: March 30, 2005
The Beast of Bentonville (better known as Wal-Mart) is grappling with a spate of management
dismissals and investigations over the past few months that appear rooted in internal petty thievery. But
rather than a few bad apples being rooted out, it's clear that crime, greed, wrongdoing, malfeasance and
cronyism are deeply embedded in the Wal-Mart business model. Indeed, Wal-Mart could not survive without
manipulating the system and breaking the law. The management schlubs who have been shown the door are not
anomalies. They are a reflection of a culture stretching back to Sam Walton himself--a man who was a classic
bully, willing to trample on the little guy and make a profit off of the poverty of millions of people. That's
the Wal-Mart way.
Dirty battle in the Social Security war
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Marie Cocco, Newsday
Date: March 29, 2005
Supporters of President Bush's plan to privatize part of Social Security are losing the public relations war.
Some of them have decided to fight dirty. Two top Republicans recently demanded a Labor Department
investigation into union political activity on Social Security. Organized labor is enjoying a rare moment of
success. Through its public protests and vigorous lobbying, it has managed to get some big investment firms to
back out of business coalitions that provide financial and lobbying support for the White House Social Security
effort. The firms manage billions in union pension assets. One by one, they've been deciding that their union
business is a plump bird in hand compared with the uncertainty of a deal on Social Security promoted by Bush.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Chuck Collins, TomPaine.com
Date: March 23, 2005
In one America,
we hold bake sales to buy Kevlar bulletproof vests for family members deployed to Iraq. In another America,
lobbyists press to abolish the estate tax. This will ensure that the children of multimillionaires--who are not
losing sleep over insufficient body armor--will harvest unlimited inheritances into the millions and billions.
As we mark the second anniversary of the Iraq mission, there is a stunning inequality of sacrifice on the home
front. The Bush administration and congressional leaders have shown little interest in the symbolism, let alone
practice, of shared sacrifice. There are no tire drives, no calls for rationing, nor any moral duty to share in
the costs of the war. The war managers are determined to isolate the domestic sacrifice and losses for this war
to as few families as possible--largely to those waiting for loved ones to return from duty in Iraq.
Mr. Greenspan, I beg to differ
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Robert B. Reich, TomPaine.com
Date: March 17, 2005
It's
not federal spending that's out of whack. What's really responsible for the giant deficits is found on the
revenue side of the ledger. As a percentage of the total economy, tax revenues are plunging. We haven't seen
revenues this low, as measured against the total economy, in half a century. Take a close look at government
revenues. Payments coming into government from payroll taxes--which are paid mostly by America's huge middle
class--are at an historic high. But look at what's being collected from income and corporate taxes, and
measured against the economy as a whole you get the smallest take in more than 60 years. And, of course, income
taxes and corporate taxes come mainly from people earning more than $200,000 a year. In other words, the
federal deficit has gone up mainly because wealthier Americans are paying less in taxes.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Robert Kuttner, Boston Globe
Date: March 16, 2005
The Republicans just did it again. They pushed through Congress a bankruptcy
''reform" bill written by credit card companies. The bill makes it harder for ordinary people crushed by debt
(often medical debt) to start anew. It leaves intact dodges used by wealthy people, such as asset-hiding
trusts, and the corporate ability to use bankruptcy to slash wages, evade pension responsibilities, and stiff
creditors. There's a larger story here. Time after time, Bush administration policies do real economic harm to
ordinary people, yet the Democrats can't seem to turn that reality into winning politics. Why not?
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Paul Krugman, New York Times
Date: March 15, 2005
The argument
over Social Security privatization isn't about rival views on how to secure the program's future--even the
administration admits that private accounts would do nothing to help the system's finances. It's a debate
about what kind of society America should be. And it's a debate Republicans appear to be losing, because the
public doesn't share their view that it's a good idea to expose middle-class families, whose lives have
become steadily riskier over the past few decades, to even more risk. But the Republicans' loss may not be the
Democrats' gain, for two reasons. One is that some Democrats, in the name of centrism, echo Republican talking
points. The other is that claims to be defending average families ring hollow when you defer to corporate
interests on votes that matter.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Arianna Huffington, TomPaine.com
Date: March 10, 2005
Instead
of cracking down on predatory lending practices, closing loopholes that favor the wealthy, and strengthening
the safety net for working people, single mothers and elderly Americans struggling to recover from a financial
setback, the Senate put together a nasty little bill that reads like a credit industry wish list. A recent
study by Harvard University found that half of last year's 1.6 million bankruptcies were the result of
crushing medical bills. Put another way: every 30 seconds, someone in this country files for bankruptcy in the
wake of a serious illness. Instead of adapting to this harsh new reality, where hardworking, middle-class folks
can be financially destroyed by a sudden illness, the Senate is about to approve a one-size-fits-all law that
treats a family man who has sunk into debt because of a heart attack the same as a con artist who maxes out his
MasterCard, then refuses to pay up.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Paul Krugman, New York Times
Date: March 8, 2005
Today the Senate
is expected to vote to limit debate on a bill that toughens the existing bankruptcy law, probably ensuring the
bill's passage. A solid bloc of Republican senators, assisted by some Democrats, has already voted down a
series of amendments that would either have closed loopholes for the rich or provided protection for some poor
and middle-class families. The bill was written by and for credit card companies, and the industry's political
muscle is the reason it seems unstoppable. But the bill also fits into the broader context of what Jacob
Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, calls "risk privatization": a steady erosion of the protection the
government provides against personal misfortune, even as ordinary families face ever-growing economic
insecurity.
Format: News Commentary
Source: William Fisher, Dissident Voice
Date: March 5, 2005
I don't really
care who gets hired by [certain] discredited and disgraceful outfits. At least, not until I'm asked to help
pay their salaries. And that's what the U.S. House of Representatives is asking me--and you--to do. Yesterday,
224 of our courageous representatives passed the first rollback of religious liberty since President Reagan
signed the Job Training Partnership Act into law back in 1982. What they okayed was use of tax dollars to fund
religious discrimination in hiring for government-funded jobs. So the House made it OK to demand that taxpayers
help finance hiring policies that say Protestants-only or Muslims-only, or Catholics-only, or Jews-only, or,
for that matter, whites or blacks or Asians-only. Despite the aggressive opposition of a huge coalition of
religious, civil rights, labor, educational, and other advocacy groups, President Bush pushed hard for passage
as part of his Faith Based Initiative.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Robert B. Reich, New York Times
Date: February 28, 2005
Today's
economy offers us a Faustian bargain: it can give consumers deals largely because it hammers workers and
communities. We can blame big corporations, but we're mostly making this bargain with ourselves. The easier it
is for us to get great deals, the stronger the downward pressure on wages and benefits. But you and I aren't
just consumers. We're also workers and citizens. How do we strike the right balance? The only way for the
workers or citizens in us to trump the consumers in us is through laws and regulations that make our purchases
a social choice as well as a personal one. The prices on sales tags don't reflect the full prices we have to
pay as workers and citizens. A sensible public debate would focus on how to make that total price as low as
possible.
Labor pains: eight simple rules
Format: News Commentary
Source: Jonathan Tasini, TomPaine.com
Date: February 28, 2005
Perhaps it's fitting that the AFL-CIO Executive Council, at which the roiling debate over the future of labor
will be played out, is being held in the land of fantasy: Las Vegas. Don't get me wrong: the fact that there
even is a debate--and a sharp one at that--is a great thing. But, count me as one who doubts that the current
debate will lead to the changes needed. These rules will help you understand what is happening in Sin City this
week and how to tell whether anything really will change.
Format: News Commentary
Source: Charlotte Fishman, CommonDreams
Date: February 23, 2005
As the debate over
Lawrence Summers' remarks keeps building and building, I confess to feeling a strange thrill. It isn't just
the satisfaction of watching an arrogant white male being taken to the woodshed. It is something else--the
startled realization that I am witnessing a newly emerging social consensus--that really stirs my blood. After
years of discussion and debate bubbling under the surface of academia, a new social consensus is revealed:
women's failure to thrive in the realm of the scientific elite cannot plausibly be explained by their lack of
talent, interest or commitment. This emerging social consensus has significant legal implications.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: David Smith, TomPaine.com
Date: February 15, 2005
With a
stunning absence of specifics, President Bush used his State of the Union address to propose a radical "reform"
of Social Security. The president was right about only one thing. Our three-legged retirement stool--Social
Security, pensions and individual savings--is weak and wobbly. Only Social Security is strong. On a range of
fronts, we should take steps to get wages growing again so that families can save--the minimum wage should go
up, it should be easier to form a union, tax policies which encourage the export of good jobs should be
repealed--and we should make affordable heath care for all a reality. Those steps--not reduced benefits and
private accounts--would bring us closer to real social security.
Social Security cure: procrastination
Format: News Commentary
Source: David R. Francis, Christian Science Monitor
Date: February 14, 2005
You
don't have to look hard for suggested solutions to Social Security. President Bush proposes private accounts.
Liberals want a number of minor tweaks. Here's another solution to the alleged crisis: do nothing. That's
right. Ignore the doomsayers. Wait for a decade or two, and see if the gloomy predictions are coming true.
It's not as crazy as it sounds because of one simple fact: No one really knows whether the forecast of a
solvency problem will come true or just gradually fade away. Why? Because economists have great difficulty
making accurate long-term projections. And 75-year economic forecasts--upon which all the current alarm is
based--are about as reliable as the Farmers' Almanac.
Boomers, budget and a so-called bust
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Robert B. Reich, TomPaine.com
Date: February 11, 2005
Today's [baby] boomers bankroll today's Social Security retirees with their payroll taxes, as does every
generation. That's the way Social Security was designed--as a pay-as-you-go system. But boomers outnumber
retirees. So there's extra money in the kitty--a Social Security surplus. Here's the dirty little secret.
Those surpluses are being used to reduce the president's budget deficits. The president's new budget predicts
that this year's deficit will be $427 billion. But it would be much, much larger--a whopping $589
billion--without this year's Social Security surplus. So if the government's going to depend for years on the
boomer's payroll taxes to reduce its budget deficits, by the time the boomers retire it should replenish
Social Security with revenues from more progressive income and corporate taxes. And in the meantime, to be
really fair, raise the cap on the amount of wages subject to the payroll tax.
The twilight zone: black history, Bush-style
Format: News Commentary
Source: Maya Rockeymoore, Black Commentator
Date: February 10, 2005
Just in
time for Black History Month, the nation enters a dialogue about race that could have important socioeconomic
implications for generations of African Americans. At issue is President Bush's charge that the Social
Security system is unfair to African Americans because they do not live as long as whites. The President is
right to focus the nation on the need to promote ownership and wealth creation in the United States. Yet he is
wrong to attempt to execute his plan by undermining Social Security. If the President really cares about the
welfare of African Americans, he would seek to close health disparities and give people an opportunity to earn
extra money to put on top of Social Security's guarantee.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Martha Burk, TomPaine.com
Date: February 10, 2005
One of the loudest
voices in the debate about Social Security privatization belongs to Rep. Bill Thomas. Thomas recently proposed
"adjusting" Social Security benefits so that women, who live longer than men, wouldn't receive greater overall
benefits. But it turns out that the numbers show women are already being cheated out of well-earned benefits.
It's definitely time for an adjustment--just not the one Rep. Thomas has in mind.
The right's attack on public pensions
Format: News Commentary
Source: Phil Angelides, Los Angeles Times
Date: February 7, 2005
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says getting rid of public pension plans for California's state
and local government workers is about helping to balance the budget. Peel back the budget wrapping on his plan,
though, and you will find the governor's real agenda: the California prong of a national attack on the pension
funds that have stood up for corporate reform and the interests of ordinary families and investors hurt by the
recent wave of corporate scandal. Across the country, the governor's ideological soul mates are targeting
public pension funds for elimination because those funds have stood up for ordinary investors against rampant
corporate abuses. The governor and his right-wing ideologues have targeted the pension funds not because the
funds have strayed, but because they are leading the fight on behalf of ordinary shareholders to put
transparency and accountability back into American capitalism.
Format: Editorial
Source: Washington Post
Date: February 7, 2005
Between 2000 and
2003, the number of people living in poverty rose 14 percent. In 2003, one out of every eight Americans was
poor, a disproportionate number of them children. The number without health insurance was the highest on
record. The poorest fell further below the poverty line while the richest took home a greater share of national
income than ever. We recite these depressing numbers today, as President Bush prepares to unveil his fiscal
2006 budget, because budgets are not only dry, fact-choked documents but a measure of the national character.
These are the budgetary times that try the nation's soul. In the face of this unhappy fiscal reality, the risk
is that the budget ax will fall most heavily on the poorest and most vulnerable Americans, those with the
greatest need for government help but the smallest voice in the corridors of power.
Format: Editorial
Source: New York Times
Date: February 6, 2005
Meatpackers, driven by the
brutal economics of the industry, always try to hire the cheapest labor they can find. That increasingly means
immigrants whose language difficulties compound the risks of the job. The result, according to a new report by
Human Rights Watch, is "extraordinarily high rates of injury" in conditions that systematically violate human
rights. The industry has little incentive to improve conditions on its own, except a decent regard for human
rights. The only reasonable prospect of improvement depends on the enforcement of federal and state law.
Unfortunately, those laws at present are too weak and too riddled with loopholes to provide the regulations
needed to increase worker safety and improve workers' rights. A systematic regulatory look at the meat
industry, with an eye to toughening standards, is desperately needed.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Paul Krugman, New York Times
Date: February 4, 2005
A few weeks ago I
tried to explain the logic of Bush-style Social Security privatization: it is, in effect, as if your financial
adviser told you that you wouldn't have enough money when you retire--but you shouldn't save more. Instead,
you should borrow a lot of money, buy stocks and hope for capital gains. Do you believe that we should replace
America's most successful government program with a system in which workers engage in speculation that no
financial adviser would recommend? Do you believe that we should do this even though it will do nothing to
improve the program's finances? If so, George Bush has a deal for you.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Paul Krugman, New York Times
Date: February 1, 2005
The fight over
Social Security is, above all, about what kind of society we want to have. But it's also about numbers. And
the numbers the privatizers use just don't add up. Let me inflict some of those numbers on you. Sorry, but
this is important. Schemes for Social Security privatization, like the one described in the 2004 Economic
Report of the President, invariably assume that investing in stocks will yield a high annual rate of return,
6.5 or 7 percent after inflation, for at least the next 75 years. Without that assumption, these schemes can't
deliver on their promises. Yet a rate of return that high is mathematically impossible unless the economy grows
much faster than anyone is now expecting.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Jonathan Tasini, TomPaine.com
Date: February 1, 2005
Among his
priorities this year, President Bush wants to make his tax cuts permanent. Not only do these tax cuts heap
billions onto our national debt, but the evidence shows they don't produce the jobs his administration claims
they will. Since the tax cuts took effect in July 2003, the administration's projected monthly job growth was
only met or exceeded three times. Overall, the promise of 5.5 million jobs fell 3.1 million jobs short--one of
the worst job-creation records in the past century. As important, wages are stagnating--which explains why
people remain very nervous about the economy. With the past experience laid out for all to see--the public
should not buy any State of the Union claims that more tax cuts will help create more jobs.
Fairness in workplace is a double-edged sword
Format: Advice Column
Source: Andrea Kay (Gannett), The Desert Sun
Date: January 31, 2005
Most of you tell me what you will never tell your employer. How much you
resent your boss for not giving you feedback. How annoyed you are they brought in some yo-yo from the outside
to fill a position you aspired to for three years. How unappreciated you are, how ill-equipped you feel to do a
job because no one is supporting you. Or how uncreative your work has become. Why are you telling me instead of
your manager? Let me guess. You figure it won't do any good. You've tried but nothing changed. You've
dropped 10 hints. It could even be risky. Besides, by now you're looking for a new job, right? Whether you're
a senior executive or an administrative assistant, you have one thing in common with every dissatisfied worker
I hear from: You feel you've been treated unfairly.
Format: Political Column
Source: V.B. Price, Albuquerque Tribute
Date: January 31, 2005
I wonder what Dennis Chavez, the late U.S. senator from New Mexico, would be thinking
today in an America where unions have been gutted, civil liberties are being undermined and the old-age
protections of Social Security and Medicare are being seriously attacked by plutocrats in the White House. I
say he'd be outraged and eloquently and relentlessly outspoken. He wouldn't be toadying around with the
Ruling Party.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Robert B. Reich, TomPaine.com
Date: January 28, 2005
Think the budget
deficit is too large, but not really something you should worry about? Think again. The deficit may be so large
as to seem abstract, but it translates to higher prices on everything you buy. Our economy is steadily slowing
down, choked by debt--all so tax cuts for the rich can become a permanent fixture.
Privatizing Social Security: 'me' over 'we'
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Benjamin R. Barber, Los Angeles Times
Date: January 27, 2005
Social Security privatization has been vigorously challenged on both economic and
technical grounds. Yet the most profound cost of privatization has been wholly ignored: the systemic cost to
our public way of life. By turning a public social insurance and pension policy into a private bet in which
personal and private decisions determine who does well and who does badly, we do irreparable harm to our
democratic "common ground." After all, one of this nation's greatest public goods has been its promise to give
every working family a guarantee of support at retirement, or in case of disability or death. You cannot simply
take justice out of the public realm and put it into the private realm without fundamentally weakening the
democracy on which the very possibility of justice depends.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Shelley Waters Boots, TomPaine.com
Date: January 26, 2005
Time is
money, and these days there doesn't seem to be enough of either to go around. The new reality in today's 24/7
economy is that the demands on workers continue to grow, but compensation, benefits and flexibility fail to
keep up. Unfortunately, it is not just workers that pay a high price. In this game of long hours, shrinking
benefits and stagnating wages, the biggest losers are workers' children and families. Between 1970 and 2001,
the percentage of mothers in the workforce rose from 38 to 67 percent. Compared to 30 years ago, today's
dual-income parents put in one additional month of full-time work each year. So what are the realities that
parents and their children face when it comes to balancing work and family?
Format: Editorial
Source: New York Times
Date: January 24, 2005
The president promises that
under a private retirement scheme, anyone age 55 or older would continue to receive full Social Security
benefits. What he repeatedly fails to mention is that privatization would require some $2 trillion in new
borrowing over the next 10 years and an additional $4.5 trillion in the decade thereafter. That's on top of
the trillions that need to be found to cover the costs of Medicare and Medicaid and - if the president gets his
way - to make this decade's tax cuts permanent. It's foolhardy to assume that the government could continue
to meet all of its obligations, including the payment of Social Security benefits, under such a mountain of
debt.
Ensuring economic fairness is every worker's battle to wage
Format: Political Column
Source: Bill Graham, Kansas City Star
Date: January 19, 2005
This business of increasing the number of
working people living just above or below the poverty line -- but with little hope of escaping debt and money
troubles -- will turn on us someday. One point of justice that concerned Martin Luther King Jr. is among the
most difficult to address -- economic fairness. The Rev. Vernon P. Howard, featured speaker Monday at
Liberty's King celebration, reminded those in Gano Chapel that King was slain during his efforts on behalf of
striking garbage workers in Memphis. "He died trying to help sanitation workers get decent wages and working
conditions," Howard said.
We Need to Play Fair in Game of Life
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Tim McGuire, Ventura County Star
Date: January 15, 2005
Some people say sports are metaphors for life. I would argue sports are real
life and they offer us some instructive lessons for ethics and workplace harmony.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Paul Krugman, New York Times
Date: January 14, 2005
The details of
British privatization differ from the likely Bush administration plan because the starting point was different.
But there are basic similarities. Guaranteed benefits were cut; workers were expected to make up for these
benefit cuts by earning high returns on their private accounts. The selling of privatization also bore a
striking resemblance to President Bush's crisis-mongering. Britain had a retirement system that was working
quite well, but conservative politicians issued grim warnings about the distant future, insisting that
privatization was the only answer. The main difference from the current U.S. situation was that Britain was
better prepared for the transition. Even so, it all went wrong.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Ben Hubbard, Boston Globe
Date: January 14, 2005
If there's one voice conspicuously absent in the debate over replacing Social
Security with private investment accounts, it is young people--the ones with the most to lose. Listen to any
argument for privatization and one thing is clear--it's all in the name of young Americans. But, in fact, this
administration's record reflects a deep disregard for the interests of young Americans. This administration
has demonstrated over and over its willingness to put ideological purity, political loyalty, and the profits of
its corporate patrons above the broad public interest. Why should young people believe that its risky Social
Security privatization scheme would be any different?
Format: Op-Ed
Source: J. Bradford DeLong, TomPaine.com
Date: January 14, 2005
Trying to assess the urgency of Social Security reform? In comparison to the massive threat posed by the
deficits in the general fund, currently standing at $7 trillion, the far-off imbalance of Social Security is
but a slowly leaking tire on a car that has already crashed into a tree. So why is the Bush administration
proposing radical changes to the Social Security system?
Format: Political Column
Source: Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation
Date: January 12, 2005
On
January 20, hundreds of Republicans will descend on Washington, DC, wearing furs, boots and Stetsons, and
partying like the Hollywood stars (they love to loathe) at festivities that will cost some $40 million to
host--or $25 million more than the first pledge of US assistance to victims of the tsunami. With the
Republicans in control of all three federal branches, building a new consensus for sane economic policies that
give more opportunity to more Americans will take time, organizing and savvy political and policy skills. But,
it's an urgent project, and it's never too late to begin setting out the alternatives. Americans should not
be required to work eighty-hour weeks just to pay the rent, eat, and live in a decent neighborhood.
Comcast can do better for workers
Format: Op-Ed
Source: David Bonior, Philadelphia Daily News
Date: January 7, 2005
This weekend, the nation's foremost labor and management academics, practitioners and government officials
will gather in Philadelphia for the Labor and Employment Relations Association's annual conference. Labor
relations in the United States has reached a state of crisis. It's in our interest to reverse this condition.
All of us--employers and workers, academics, public-interest organizations, government agencies and the general
public--must put our heads together. We need to create labor relations strategies that both support corporate
growth at the same time we preserve workers' rights to organize and bargain with their bosses over the terms
and conditions of their employment.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: David Bacon, International Labor Communications Association
Date: January 6, 2005
The AFL-CIO has a huge job. Raising the percentage of
organized workers in the U.S. from just 10 to 11 percent would mean organizing over a million people. Only a
social movement can organize people on this scale. In addition to examining structural reforms that can make
unions more effective and concentrate their power, the labor movement needs a program which can inspire people
to organize on their own, one which is unafraid to put forward radical demands, and rejects the constant
argument that any proposal that can't get through Congress next year is not worth fighting for. Only a new,
radical social vision can inspire the wave of commitment, idealism and activity necessary to rebuild the labor
movement.
The 'other America' may be coming back
Format: Political Column
Source: Harold Meyerson, Washington Post
Date: January 5, 2005
We
have come so far in such a short time that's it's hard for people who aren't seniors to imagine an America
in which old age was all but synonymous with desperation. There's no great mystery to unravel here. Above all,
what changed the lives of America's senior citizens were the significant increases in Social Security benefits
enacted in the 1960s and '70s, and the indexing of those benefits to average wage growth. But since the Bush
administration is reportedly soon to propose ending that indexing, and replacing it with a different formula
that would greatly reduce benefits, it's worth taking a moment to look back at senior poverty as it existed in
the year of John F. Kennedy's election as president.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Paul Krugman, New York Times
Date: January 4, 2005
The people who
hustled America into a tax cut to eliminate an imaginary budget surplus and a war to eliminate imaginary
weapons are now trying another bum's rush. If they succeed, we will do nothing about the real fiscal threat
and will instead dismantle Social Security, a program that is in much better financial shape than the rest of
the federal government. In the next few weeks, I'll explain why privatization will fatally undermine Social
Security, and suggest steps to strengthen the program. I'll also talk about the much more urgent fiscal
problems the administration hopes you won't notice while it scares you about Social Security. Today let's
focus on one piece of those scare tactics: the claim that Social Security faces an imminent crisis.
The Social Security fear factor
Format: Editorial
Source: New York Times
Date: January 3, 2005
The administration wants
workers to divert some of the payroll taxes that currently pay for Social Security into private investment
accounts, in exchange for a much-reduced government benefit. To replace the taxes it would otherwise have
collected--money it needs to pay benefits to current and near retirees--the government would borrow an
estimated $2 trillion over the next 10 years or so and even more thereafter. In effect, the administration's
plan would get rid of the financial burden of Social Security by getting rid of Social Security. The plan
shifts the financial risk of growing old onto each individual and off of the government--where it is dispersed
among a very large population, as with any sensible insurance policy. In a privatized system, you may do fine,
but your fellow retirees may not, or vice versa.
Protecting Americans' rights at work
Format: Op-Ed
Source: David Bonior, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Date: December 26, 2004
American workers are losing their rights. Over the past several months, decisions
by the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency charged with enforcing labor law, have stripped
workers of legal protections. The system to protect workers has been broken for a long time, but it's getting
worse. As Americans, we value the democratic notion that working men and women should have a voice in the
workplace. We believe that hard work and loyalty deserve to be rewarded and that working people should share in
the benefits of the good things they help make possible. Americans' rights at work must be restored, protected
and guaranteed.
What's new in the legal world? A growing campaign to undo the New Deal
Format: Editorial
Source: Adam Cohen, New York Times
Date: December 14, 2004
The New Deal made an unexpected appearance at the Supreme Court recently--in the form of a 1942 case about
wheat. Some prominent states' rights conservatives were asking the court to overturn Wickard v. Filburn, a
landmark ruling that laid out an expansive view of Congress's power to legislate in the public interest.
Supporters of states' rights have always blamed Wickard, and a few other cases of the same era, for paving the
way for strong federal action on workplace safety, civil rights and the environment. Although they are unlikely
to reverse Wickard soon, states' rights conservatives are making progress in their drive to restore the narrow
view of federal power that predated the New Deal--and render Congress too weak to protect Americans on many
fronts.
Other views: what's a 'girlie woman' to think?
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Rebecca LaVally, Sacramento Bee
Date: December 13, 2004
2004 marked the 40-year anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, signed by President Lyndon
Johnson, which in part banned job discrimination based on gender, race and ethnicity. When Congress and the
president acted ahead of public opinion to bring equity to the workplace, they set in motion forces that would
change the way we speak. At the time, the notion that any female or male could hold practically any job she or
he was qualified for was revolutionary. But by the mid-1970s, affirmative action and federal lawsuits were
making the notion stick, propelling women into formerly all-male work. As realities changed, so would the
mother tongue, now forced to contort herself around such oddities as female mailman.
Raising the minimum wage morally right
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Peter Dreier, Kelly Candaele, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Date: December 12, 2004
The minimum wage victories in Florida and Nevada are a political neon
sign blinking brightly at Democrats. Although these two states favored President Bush on Nov. 2, voters
overwhelmingly approved ballot measures to raise the minimum wage by one dollar in both states. The
conventional wisdom says that Bush won a second term by defending the moral values derived from traditional
religious teachings. But many major religious denominations support raising the minimum wage. When President
Bush is sworn in for a second term, we should all push our lawmakers to raise the national minimum wage.
Unions, civil rights groups, religious organizations and others who care about basic fairness ought to lead
this charge.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: J. Bradford DeLong, TomPaine.com
Date: December 10, 2004
Almost
all of the world's developed countries consider themselves, and are, social democracies: mixed economies with
very large governments performing a wide array of welfare and social insurance functions, and removing large
chunks of wealth and commodity distribution from the market. The United States is something different. Or is
it? Whatever it has been in the past, the United States in the future will have to choose whether, and how
much, it will be a social democracy.
Format: News Commentary
Source: Dean Baker, The Nation
Date: December 9, 2004
Social Security is
the country's most important and successful social program. While polls show majority support for private
accounts, that's only when the question is asked, Would you like a private account? When the real-world
question, Would you like a private account if it means a cut in your Social Security benefits? is asked,
substantial majorities say no. Bush's Social Security plans are grounds for a decisive battle early in the
Administration's second term. The public is overwhelmingly on our side; they just need to know the truth.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Paul Krugman, New York Times
Date: December 7, 2004
Privatizing
Social Security--replacing the current system, in whole or in part, with personal investment accounts--won't
do anything to strengthen the system's finances. If anything, it will make things worse. Nonetheless, the
politics of privatization depend crucially on convincing the public that the system is in imminent danger of
collapse, that we must destroy Social Security in order to save it. Very little about the privatizers'
position is honest. They come to bury Social Security, not to save it. They aren't sincerely concerned about
the possibility that the system will someday fail; they're disturbed by the system's historic success. For
Social Security is a government program that works, a demonstration that a modest amount of taxing and spending
can make people's lives better and more secure.
Format: Editorial
Source: New York Times
Date: December 6, 2004
Persistent subpar job creation
might cause some leaders to question their policies. Yet, more high-end tax cuts and higher deficits are the
template for President Bush's second term. And flush with a victory, the president is unlikely to undertake
any policy reversals. It will be up to Congress to break out of its lockstep with Mr. Bush and take steps to
address the real problems of constituents, rather than the intransigent aspirations of the administration.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Patrick C. Doherty, TomPaine.com
Date: December 2, 2004
Last
week, America received two pieces of monstrously bad news. First, the chief economist of Morgan Stanley (along
with Robert Reich, Larry Summers, Paul Krugman, China and the currency markets) warned us that the U.S. economy
is about to collapse. Second, we learned that the Bush administration is willing to ignore the likelihood of
collapse and will push ahead aggressively with tax and Social Security reform. Put these two pieces of
information together and you get a nightmare scenario. Movement conservatives are willing to tank the economy
while they control the federal government in order to remake it according to their liking.
Restoring workers' rights has always been a moral value
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Stewart Acuff, International Labor Communications Association
Date: November 30, 2004
Though many might
scoff, I think there is a neat and convenient intersection where our values and political pragmatism meet. At
this intersection are universal healthcare, improving Social Security, a global trading system that lifts
working families and not just corporations, full-time work for living wages, and the restoration of workers'
freedom to form unions and bargain collectively. It is critical that the progressive community takes on this
issue as its own fight because it is a comprehensive effort that brings together so many issues important to
us. Restoring the freedom to form unions ties so many of the issues and values we care about together.
Format: Editorial
Source: New York Times
Date: November 30, 2004
The Supreme Court hears
arguments today in a case that raises important issues about who is covered by antidiscrimination law. An
Alabama girls' basketball coach lost his position in 2001 after complaining that his team was being
discriminated against. He sued under Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in schools
receiving federal funds. The school argued, in response, that the coach was not part of the class that Congress
intended to protect with the law. The court should hold that he is covered by Title IX, because he is alleging
that he lost his position as a result of sex discrimination.
Social Security is not in crisis
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Dean Baker, TomPaine.com
Date: November 30, 2004
After
the inauguration, Bush is scheduled to push for tort reform first, then attack Social Security. His
entitlements offensive relies on the White House's ability to make Americans think Social Security is in
crisis. If people knew the truth about Social Security's finances, there would be no support for [the]
President's benefit cuts and privatization plan--and that is why proponents of privatization have worked hard
to spread fear about Social Security's financial health. But look at the numbers and reach your own
conclusion.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Charlie Cray, Lee Drutman, TomPaine.com
Date: November 30, 2004
One abiding faith that almost all Americans share is that in a democracy, the citizens should
be able to decide how they wish to live--not some big bureaucracy or institution, whether it's the government
or a big corporation. The most effective way to control corporations will be to reclaim the once
widely-accepted principle that corporations exist to serve the public good. Until we have brought the most
important economic institutions under control, it will be impossible to create the just and sustainable economy
that we seek, an economy driven by the values of human life and community and democracy instead of the current
suicide economy driven only by the relentless pursuit of financial profit at any cost.
Format: News Commentary
Source: Robert B. Reich, TomPaine.com
Date: November 24, 2004
The holiday buying
season is upon us. You might as well spend your cash now because the dollar is dropping like a stone in
international currency markets. It's dropped nearly 30 percent since 2001, and is now at a record low. Even
without the recent dour pronouncements of Alan Greenspan and Treasury Secretary John Snow, the greenback is
likely to fall further. And the reason is simple: We're living beyond our means. American consumers are deep
in debt. The nation is importing more than we're exporting. Most importantly, the federal budget deficit is
out of control.
Media blacks out Bush assault on minimum wage
Format: News Commentary
Source: David Swanson, International Labor Communications Association
Date: November 22, 2004
Bush's success in
reducing the value of the minimum wage in each of the past four years has wreaked havoc with the lives of
millions of working Americans, but it does not exist as a media story. Don't expect a flood of coverage of
this issue. Don't expect lies about the effects of a decent minimum wage to be eliminated or corrected. Don't
expect "think tanks" funded by restaurants and hotels to be identified by their funding sources. And don't
expect the views of those working for the minimum wage to be included in media coverage. Public opinion, of
course, favors fixing the minimum wage, but our public discourse--dominated by the major media outlets--often
has little regard for public opinion.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Bob Herbert, New York Times
Date: November 22, 2004
A report from the
Department of Agriculture show[s] that more than 12 million American families continue to struggle to feed
themselves. The 12 million families represent 11.2 percent of all U.S. households. "At some time during the
year," the report said, "these households were uncertain of having enough food." These are dismal statistics
for a country as well-to-do as the United States. But we don't hear much about them because hunger is
associated with poverty, and poverty is not even close to becoming part of our national conversation. What does
that tell you about American values?
A warning for Social Security "reformers"
Format: News Commentary
Source: Bernard Wasow, Century Foundation
Date: November 17, 2004
The
Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC), which guarantees private pension plans, just announced that its
net liabilities are double earlier estimates, more than $23 billion. Are Social Security privatization and
trouble at the PBGC related? You bet. The trouble at the PBGC illustrates the great risks involved in
retirement planning, risks that have swamped enough private pension plans to require a Congressional bailout.
Yet the Bush administration is proposing to wind down the only part of retirement income that is
secure--guaranteed against the business cycle, inflation, and corporate malfeasance--and replace it with risky
private accounts, with no guarantees at all.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Robert Reich, TomPaine.com
Date: November 17, 2004
The basic
concept of Social Security is one based on trust--which is why the spectre of future generations placing money
into private accounts breaks that trust and raises the question of where the money will come from for the next
retiring generation. Bush's guarantees that he won't change Social Security benefits for current retirees is
highly unlikely under a privatization plan.
A federal minimum wage increase is urgent, regardless of election outcome
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Matthew Cardinale, OpEdNews.com
Date: November 15, 2004
Working American families can't wait four more years more for a more sympathetic President to
fight for an increase in the federal minimum wage increase. It's time to raise it now. Progressive activists
need to carry on the crucial fight, with or without Kerry in the White House. For a national culture that
supposedly values "hard work," we certainly don't put our money where our mouth is. Often we see the hardest
working Americans only sinking further into debt, unable to afford health care, and even going through episodes
of homelessness. These kinds of contradictions, where our policies don't match our values, are leading to
disillusionment among the children of working families today.
Still waiting to hear how poverty war will be won
Format: Editorial
Source: Martha Orozco, Houston Chronicle
Date: October 28, 2004
For the past year, I've listened with interest to the presidential candidates. I have listened specifically
for the candidates' views on poverty joblessness, homelessness, hunger, lack of health care and a living wage.
With few exceptions, the men and women who sought the presidency talked little of these issues in the context
of poor people. It should not matter whether you are a Republican with compassionate conservative values or a
Democrat who values social justice. You should want better for your fellow Americans than what is available to
the 35.8 million people living below the poverty line in the richest country in the world.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Karen Kornbluh, Laurie Rubiner, TomPaine.com
Date: October 21, 2004
Women pay the greatest price for our outdated social contract. They can no longer depend on a lifelong mate to
provide economic security, and when they enter the job market themselves, their family responsibilities close
many doors. They have less job security, lower wages and fewer benefits. But what the president offers women is
bait-and-switch politics. His Ownership Society proposals would make women far less economically secure than
they are today by eliminating--instead of reforming--the risk-sharing mechanisms of our social contract
programs. These proposals would leave Americans "owning" more of their own economic insecurity.
Social policy? Stereotypes are simpler
Format: Editorial
Source: Rod Watson, Buffalo News
Date: October 21, 2004
[A] report came out
the other day showing that the wealth gap between whites and minorities has increased and that blacks actually
saw their net worth decline from 1996 to 2002. The report was socioeconomic manna to those eager to point to
the poor personal choices by blacks who would rather buy frivolous stuff than save or invest. You can't
explain why whites' median net worth of $88,651 is 14 times that of blacks'--and 11 times that of
Hispanics'--by pointing simply to spending habits. So what does explain the wealth gap? It's a legacy of U.S.
social policy. And it will be closed only through conscious social policy.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Matt Miller, Star-Telegram
Date: October 15, 2004
Here's an idea so far
outside the box that it may not get the hearing it deserves: It's time to disenfranchise men and allow only
women to vote. Suppose that you want an America in which everyone has basic health coverage, every full-time
worker earns a living wage and every poor child has a great teacher in a fixed-up school. I want these things
so much I wrote a book (The Two Percent Solution) about how both parties might come together on this
agenda in ways that blend the best of liberal and conservative approaches. After asking some top political
consultants how to make the ideas more actionable, I commissioned a poll. That's when I found out: Men are the
problem.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Bob Herbert, New York Times
Date: October 8, 2004
A new study
shows how tough a time American families are having in their never-ending struggle to put food on the table and
keep a roof over their heads. The study, jointly sponsored by the Annie E. Casey, Ford and Rockefeller
Foundations, show[s] that 9.2 million working families in the United States--one out of every four--earn wages
that are so low they are barely able to survive financially. "Our data is very solid and shows that this is a
much bigger problem than most people imagine," said Brandon Roberts, one of the authors of the report. Mr.
Roberts said he hoped the study, titled "Working Hard, Falling Short," would help initiate a national
discussion of the plight of families who are doing the right thing but not earning enough to get ahead.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Austan Goolsbee, New York Times
Date: October 1, 2004
A serious
financial disaster looms for the pension system. The crisis concerns the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation,
the federal agency that insures workers' pensions in case their employer defaults. The system is not supposed
to cost taxpayers anything. But a dreadful lack of judgment, coupled with a new federal law, could leave the
public with a $100 billion bill. Why doesn't the agency have the money to cover this shortfall? Fundamentally,
it is an insurance company. Higher risk ought to mean higher prices. But the pension agency doesn't work that
way. Congress is doing its best to make financial catastrophe more likely.
Where did all the jobs go? Nowhere
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Daniel W. Drezner, New York Times
Date: September 29, 2004
Now, we can
add some actual figures to the overheated [outsourcing] debate. The Government Accountability Office has issued
its first review of the data, and one undeniable conclusion to be drawn from it is that outsourcing is not
quite the job-destroying tsunami it's been made out to be. The American economy has some formidable challenges
in the coming decades--rising health care costs, a ballooning federal budget deficit, failing schools and the
need for greater investment in new technology and innovation. The voters should concentrate on the candidates'
plans to overcome those obstacles, not on needless hoopla over outsourcing.
You are guilty ... of shopping at Wal-Mart
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Mike Kilen, Des Moines Register
Date: September 27, 2004
Nearly every day you can read astounding Wal-Mart Nation news and add your own
exaggeration. So where is the guilt for driving down wages, pitting workers against consumers and for ravaging
Main Street Iowa? Average Iowans vote with their feet and enter by the thousands under the "Lower Prices"
banner every day. They can't afford not to. The question remains for any shopper: At what point do personal
savings outweigh the social cost?
Uncle Sam is hard at work for U.S. corporations
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Walter Williams, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Date: September 27, 2004
The worsening income disparities between the rich and ordinary citizens--the greatest
since the 1920s--have been a major factor pushing the nation into plutocratic governance. The tax reductions
for the wealthy and major business firms provided money that helped fuel the campaigns of Washington
politicians. Under George W. Bush, the United States has become a government of the corporation, by the
corporation and for the corporation, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Such an entrenched
plutocracy is totally incompatible with the form of governance created by the Constitution to support
representative democracy.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Henry Louis Gates Jr., New York Times
Date: September 26, 2004
When
black policy types let themselves dream about racial uplift, they dream about getting to average. The fantasy
isn't that inequality vanishes; it's that inequality in black America catches up with inequality in white
America. "Look at what we could achieve if we got to be average!" Franklin Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae, told
me. "We don't need to take everybody from the ghetto and make them Harvard graduates. We just need to get
folks to average, and we'd all look around and say, 'My God, what a fundamental change has happened in this
country.'" Recently, I asked a few experts on poverty in black America about how we might get to average.
Bush's flextime remedy could be right pill for our "hurry sickness"
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Froma Harrop, Seattle Times
Date: September 15, 2004
Organized labor opposes Bush's "flextime" proposal, which it sees as a sneaky way
to help companies pay their workers less money. Unions do come by their suspicions honestly. There's hardly a
cheap-labor idea this administration hasn't embraced. But this concept does have merit. Actually, flextime has
been around many years as a women's issue. But feminists envisioned moving those 40 hours around--not reducing
them. So would it be so terrible to let Americans who put in a 45-hour week turn those five hours of overtime
into an extra day off, rather than more money? Labor groups fighting this particular Bush proposal should save
their strength for better battles.
Format: Political Column
Source: David S. Broder, Washington Post
Date: September 9, 2004
There is a story about workers and organized labor that has gone largely unnoticed this year: the link between
the decline of progressive politics and with it the near-demise of liberal legislation, and the steady
weakening of organized labor. For those who think a Wal-Mart economy is the American future, the falloff in
labor's influence is no cause for regret. But I suspect the country will continue to pay a price--and not just
union families--until labor regains a place at the economic and political table.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Robert B. Reich, TomPaine.com
Date: September 9, 2004
The
news last week that unemployment was down to 5.4 percent sounded good. But, unfortunately, there wasn't a
corresponding rise in payroll jobs. So how good, really, is the news? To understand what the unemployment
numbers really mean, you need to know what questions surveyers are asking--and how they're asking them. Bottom
line: Employers are still reluctant to hire. And it's not hard to figure out why. Demand for their goods and
services remains soft--because consumers, who are also workers, don't have enough money in their pockets or
confidence in their jobs and paychecks to flood back into the malls.
Minimum wage an insult to Americans
Format: Political Column
Source: Esther Tolson, Arbiter
Date: September 9, 2004
Why
the current refusal on the part of Bush and Republicans to stand up and call for Americans to pay their fellow
Americans a wage that does not require public assistance to survive on? Why would the party that so adamantly
despises social welfare programs want to ensure their continued need? The excuse that Republicans have used to
justify blocking numerous proposed increases to the minimum wage is that raising the minimum wage will result
in loss of jobs and harm the poor folk we are purporting to help. Others claim that it would ruin small
businesses. Unfortunately, statistics do not support this claim.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Alain de Botton, New York Times
Date: September 6, 2004
Whatever
camaraderie may build up between employer and employed, whatever goodwill workers may display and however many
years they may have devoted to a task, they must live with the knowledge and attendant anxiety that their
status is not guaranteed--that it remains dependent on their own performance and the economic well-being of
their organizations; that they are hence a means to profit, and never ends in themselves. This is all sad, but
not half as sad as it can be if we blind ourselves to the reality and raise our expectations of our work to
extreme levels. A firm belief in the necessary misery of life was for centuries one of mankind's most
important assets, a bulwark against bitterness, a defense against dashed hopes. Now it has been cruelly
undermined by the expectations incubated by the modern worldview. Now perhaps, as many of us return from summer
vacations, we can temper [our] sadness by remembering that work is often more bearable when we don't, in
addition to money, expect it always to deliver happiness.
An economy that turns American values upside down
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Bob Herbert, New York Times
Date: September 6, 2004
Today's workers
have lost power in many different ways--through the slack labor market, government policies that favor
corporate interests, the weakening of unions, the growth of lower-paying service industries, global trade,
capital mobility, the declining real value of the minimum wage, immigration and so on. The end result of all
this is a portrait of American families struggling just to hang on, rather than to get ahead. The benefits of
productivity gains and economic growth are flowing to profits, not worker compensation. The fat cats are
getting fatter, while workers, at least for the time being, are watching the curtain come down on the heralded
American dream.
Format: News Commentary
Source: Peter Dreier, The Nation
Date: September 2, 2004
Hidden in a Census
Bureau report on poverty released in late August is a factoid with significant political and social
consequences. Poverty has moved to the suburbs. Or, more accurately, poverty has expanded to the suburbs.
Today, 13.8 million poor Americans live in the suburbs--almost as many as the 14.6 million who live in central
cities. The suburban poor represent 38.5 percent of the nation's poor, compared with 40.6 percent of the total
who live in central cities. The Census data remind us that stereotypes about the "inner-city poor" and the
"suburban middle class" no longer reflect how we live.
Format: Editorial
Source: Milford Mirror
Date: September 1, 2004
The emergence of Labor Day as a national holiday 110 years ago was borne out of change in
the workplace. As the country became more industrialized, many people were working long hours in dangerous
conditions for minimal compensation. As their bosses became wealthier and they toiled harder, workers decided
they weren't going to take it anymore. Labor Day is a time for everyone to appreciate the hard work of all
Americans. That hard work will continue, but with some changes. People shouldn't be afraid of those changes.
Instead, they must focus on acquiring all the skills they can to succeed in an evolving workplace. Lifelong
training should be seen as an opportunity.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Paul Krugman, New York Times
Date: August 27, 2004
In most advanced
countries, the government provides everyone with health insurance. In America, however, the government offers
insurance only if you're elderly (Medicare) or poor (Medicaid). Otherwise, you're expected to get private
health insurance, usually through your job. But insurance premiums are exploding, and the system of
employment-linked insurance is falling apart. Rising health care costs aren't just causing a rapid rise in the
ranks of the uninsured; they're also, because of their link to employment, a major reason why this economic
recovery has generated fewer jobs than any previous economic expansion. Clearly, health care reform is an
urgent social and economic issue.
Overtime cut undermines workers
Format: Op-Ed
Source: John Sweeney, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Date: August 24, 2004
Yesterday, the biggest pay cut in American history took effect: The Bush administration's overtime pay cut
became official. It's a new federal rule that could strip up to 6 million workers of overtime pay protection,
forcing them to work longer hours without fair compensation. Not only will these employees no longer get
overtime pay--they'll be working extra hours for free, earning only their base salary. Under the new rule,
employers will tend to work their current workers longer hours rather than creating new jobs, making the
underlying problems in our economy even worse. At a time when workers' paychecks are down, joblessness is up
and Americans are working more hours than workers in any other industrialized nation, Bush has made the wrong
decision in implementing his new rule.
Format: Editorial
Source: Baltimore Sun
Date: August 19, 2004
The Labor Department's trumpeting of its new regulations governing overtime, which go into
effect next week, sounds a little tinny. But Mr. Law is right about the new day dawning Monday, when the
revisions to the Fair Labor Standards Act become the law of the land. Labor predicts the rules will require
employers to pay 1.3 million more workers at the bottom of the pay scales overtime if they earn it. Revisions
in the duties tests and classifications, though, could cause between 100,000 and 6 million to lose their
overtime eligibility. That number has been hotly debated, not only by big unions but by nonpartisan think tanks
and former Labor officials from the past two administrations. Now the nation will act as a giant laboratory.
Canadian health care better than we think
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Dave Zweifel, The Capital Times [Wisconsin]
Date: August 16, 2004
Thanks to years of propaganda from the giant corporations with a vested interest in the U.S.
health system, Americans have a somewhat jaundiced view of Canada's national health insurance program. We're
told that Canadians have to wait for simple procedures and that there are huge waiting lines for surgery.
Doctors aren't compensated adequately. We've been told that so often that we think it's true. Almost all of
it, however, is false. One of this column's regular readers sent me an article written by a Canadian doctor
after he and a group of colleagues spent some time working in our U.S. health system. Suffice it to say that
America's health insurers and drug companies aren't passing the article around.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Jonathan Tasini, TomPaine.com
Date: August 12, 2004
United
Airlines' attempt to shed responsibility for its multi-billion pension promises [is] another sure sign of the
Wal-Martization of America: the coming collapse of the traditional private sector pension plan system, mainly
because of the decline of unions. Indeed, the underfunding of pension plans is a looming disaster:
Single-employer pension plans are $350 billion short of what should be in their plans; historically, the plans
have only been short $20 to 25 billion. How do we turn back from a Wal-Mart economy to an economy in which,
among other things, real pensions become the standard? The best way to guarantee middle class livelihoods is to
encourage unionization and collective bargaining. Unless unions thrive, the end of pensions is near, signaling
the obliteration of yet another pillar of the middle class.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Jared Bernstein, American Prospect
Date: August 11, 2004
A few months ago, the Federal Reserve made it clear that it was going to start raising
interest rates. It did so at its most prior meeting in June, raising the federal funds rate. Today they went up
another 0.25 percent to 1.5 percent. Why'd the bank do it? My concern comes from the fact that rate hikes work
their magic by slowing down economic growth. As far as the job market is concerned, why would you want to
decelerate when you're already crawling? Though the Fed claims not to be influenced by political concerns,
this is, after all, Washington. Today's statement ended with a warning that the [Fed] reserves its rights to
"respond to changes in economic prospects as needed to fulfill its obligation to maintain price stability."
Note the glaring omission of "and full employment" at the end of that sentence.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Jacob S. Hacker, Washington Post
Date: August 10, 2004
Over the past two decades, two great transformations have been on a collision course--the rise of the
two-earner family and all but stagnant real wages for most workers. The sluggish economy of the past few years
has made the resulting strains unmistakable. By many measures, American families in the middle of the income
ladder are stretched thinner today than at any point since the early 1980s. Perhaps more important, their
economic situation has, in ways both big and small, become notably more precarious.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Lee Price, TomPaine.com
Date: August 10, 2004
Our economy is
sputtering once again. July, with its meager 32,000 job gain, was the fourth consecutive month of shrinking job
gains. It wasn't supposed to turn out this way. We need faster job growth, to provide more people with income
from work. Just to keep even with population growth, we need to add 140,000 to 150,000 jobs every month. To
absorb new workers and to put the unemployed back in jobs, we ought to create at least 250,000 to 300,000 jobs
each month. A few months of weak job gains would be less worrisome if other indicators' strength made a
rebound seem imminent. Unfortunately, that is not the case today.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times
Date: July 26, 2004
This could be
the central battle of the 21st century: Earth people versus the Wal-Martians. Wal-Mart's only hope lies with
its ostensible opponents, like Madeline Janis-Aparicio, who led the successful fight against a new superstore
in Inglewood, Calif. "The point is not to destroy them," she told me, "but to make them accountable." Similarly
Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, will soon begin a national effort to "bring
Wal-Mart up to standards we can live with." He envisions a nationwide movement bringing together the unions,
churches, community organizations and environmentalists who are already standing up to the company's
recklessly metastatic growth. Earth to Wal-Mars, or wherever you come from: Live with us or go back to the
mother ship.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Bob Herbert, New York Times
Date: July 23, 2004
A startling new
study shows that all of the growth in the employed population in the United States over the past few years can
be attributed to recently arrived immigrants. The study found that from the beginning of 2001 through the first
four months of 2004, the number of new immigrants who found work in the U.S. was 2.06 million, while the number
of native-born and longer-term immigrant workers declined by more than 1.3 million. The study, from the Center
for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, is further confirmation that American families
are still struggling with serious issues of joblessness and underemployment.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Stephen S. Roach, New York Times
Date: July 22, 2004
Through
February, the United States was mired in the depths of the worst jobless recovery of the post-World War II era.
Now, there are signs the magic may be back. More than a million jobs have been added to total nonfarm payrolls
over the past four months, the sharpest increase since early 2000. But there's little cause for celebration:
the increases barely make a dent in the weakest hiring cycle in modern history. From three different vantage
points--employment breakdowns by industry, by occupation and by degree of attachment--the same basic picture
emerges: While there has been an increase in job creation over the past four months, the bulk of the activity
has been at the low end of the quality spectrum. The Great American Job Machine is not even close to generating
the surge of the high-powered jobs that is typically the driving force behind greater incomes and consumer
demand.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Robert Kuttner, Boston Globe
Date: July 21, 2004
There are far more ordinary wage-earning people than wealthy investors and
corporate moguls, but the political right has done far better at using class solidarity to its advantage than
the liberal left. Americans like to view their country as a wide-open land of opportunity. Most are uneasy
thinking in terms of class at all. Polls consistently show that if you emphasize the poor you run smack into
the fact that most Americans consider themselves middle class. Even though individual voters may resent the
fact that jobs are moving to India or that schools are lacking necessary funds or that health care benefits are
evaporating, this is not a country where most voters resent the rich as a class. It's a land where nearly
everyone would like to be rich.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Susan Antilla, New York Times
Date: July 21, 2004
As Wall Street sex
discrimination cases go, last week's $54 million deal between Morgan Stanley and the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission wasn't a bad one for women. But Morgan Stanley, and all of Wall Street, scored an even
bigger win: the statistics remain under wraps. No matter how generous a dollar settlement the commission
garnered, it is still an important step short. Wall Street will make changes only when its culture, and the
hard numbers of compensation and promotion, are exposed in open court. But don't hold your breath.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Bob Herbert, New York Times
Date: July 19, 2004
A new study of black
male employment trends has come up with the following extremely depressing finding: "By 2002, one of every four
black men in the U.S. was idle all year long. This idleness rate was twice as high as that of white and
Hispanic males." It's possible the rate of idleness is even higher, said the lead author of the study, Andrew
Sum, who is director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. "That was a
conservative count," he said. The study did not consider homeless men or those in jail or prison.
Red-state America against itself
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Thomas Frank, Tomdispatch.com
Date: July 15, 2004
That our
politics have been shifting rightward for more than thirty years is a generally acknowledged fact of American
life. That this rightward movement has largely been accomplished by working-class voters whose lives have been
materially worsened by the conservative policies they have supported is a less comfortable fact, one we have
trouble talking about in a straightforward manner. I chose to observe the phenomenon by going back to my home
state of Kansas, a place that has been particularly ill-served by the conservative policies of privatization,
deregulation, and de-unionization, and that has reacted to its worsening situation by becoming more
conservative still.
A cloud over civilisation: corporate power is the driving force behind US foreign policy--and the slaughter in Iraq
Format: Op-Ed
Source: JK Galbraith, The Guardian [UK]
Date: July 15, 2004
The
modern corporation is a dominant force in the present-day economy. Corporate power has shaped the public
purpose to its own needs. As the corporate interest moves to power in what was the public sector, it serves the
corporate interest. It is most clearly evident in the largest such movement, that of nominally private firms
into the defence establishment. From this comes a primary influence on the military budget, on foreign policy,
military commitment and, ultimately, military action. War. Civilisation has made great strides over the
centuries in science, healthcare, the arts and most, if not all, economic well-being. But it has also given a
privileged position to the development of weapons and the threat and reality of war.
Minimum wage can stand some maximizing
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Amy Chasanov, The Hill
Date: July 14, 2004
Sen. Edward Kennedy's
(D-Mass.) Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2004 proposes increasing the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.00. Some
Republican leaders and employer-backed organizations have come up with a disingenuous twist to their
opposition, saying they're against such an increase because it would harm the working poor. But would it help
or hurt low-wage workers to put a few more dollars in their paychecks? Fortunately, we don't have to rely on
guesswork--we've got history to guide us. Let's look at what happened after the increase in the minimum wage
that took effect in 1996 and 1997.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Eduardo Ruelas, New York Times
Date: July 4, 2004
It's not a lot of fun for me to have to get up at every morning at 5, stand on the street corner hoping to be
offered a job, and worry that if I do get work it might be dangerous. I've had friends who have broken their
arms and legs and even lost fingers while on the job. None of us has medical coverage. But the hardest part
about waiting for work is hearing the insults that are yelled at us by Farmingville residents. The fact that I
stand on a corner for work doesn't make me less human or less worthy of respect. The way I see it, everyone
from the business owners and contractors to the residents with beautifully landscaped yards benefits from
Mexican laborers. We do the jobs nobody else will do. Why can't anyone see that?
Format: Editorial
Source: New York Times
Date: July 3, 2004
It would be wrong to read too
much into one month's statistics, but there is plenty of reason to worry that this expansion is not raising
wages as much as American families need. The American economy added 112,000 new jobs last month, far fewer than
expected. That number represents a notable slowdown from the strong pace of hiring in the previous three
months. The nation's impressive productivity growth will make it difficult to significantly reduce the 5.6
percent unemployment rate. And in the absence of a tighter labor market, there is little chance that workers
will see wages increase anywhere near as much as corporate profits have. Indeed, take-home pay, as a share of
the economy, is at its lowest level since the government started keeping track in 1929. All of this suggests
that the recovery remains a work in progress for many Americans.
Working mothers caught in a bind
Format: Political Column
Source: Christian E. Weller, Center for American Progress
Date: July 2, 2004
For the past few months, the labor market has turned a corner and begun to create jobs at
a growing rate, although its pace seems to have slowed again. As jobs are being created, more and more people
who had completely given up looking for work are drawn back into the labor market. Although they are not the
majority of new job holders, women still constitute a large proportion of them. And while women tend to be the
primary caregivers of their children, the job opportunities that are expanding the fastest for women are those
where child care benefits are rarest, part-time and service-industry jobs. Consequently, affordable child care
will continue to be an important issue as the labor market continues to grow.
Workplace equality still elusive
Format: Political Column
Source: Diane Stafford, Kansas City Star
Date: July 1, 2004
A quiet
anniversary will be observed Friday: the 40th year after enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Though
it's not the kind of date that generates headlines, it's appropriate to recognize the act's workplace
legacy. The milestone federal law banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment and any federally
assisted programs. In most people's minds, the words “civil rights” evoke thoughts of skin color. The act did,
indeed, open job opportunities to racial minorities--although progress has been slow and sporadic. But the act
also barred sex discrimination in the workplace. In that, too, progress has been made, though some would call
the pace glacial.
Format: News Commentary
Source: Jonathan Tasini, TomPaine.com
Date: June 30, 2004
Bob
Kerrey's biography lists many roles. Democratic senator from Nebraska. Vietnam War hero. Dated actress Debra
Winger. Now he has added another line to his resume: attempted union-buster. In February, the adjunct faculty
at the New School in New York City voted to unionize, choosing the United Auto Workers as its representative by
a vote of 530 to 466. Kerrey is the president of the institution, which was founded as a place to pursue a more
socially progressive education. How Kerrey has behaved during the union organizing efforts is a sobering lesson
about the political landscape facing workers who try to exercise their right to form a union in America.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Deborah Cutler-Ortiz, TomPaine.com
Date: June 29, 2004
The
administration blame game of denigrating the poor has hindered the implementation of proven welfare policies.
It is more compelling to address the problems of unemployment, underemployment and low wages for people trying
to get off welfare--rather than character flaws of the poor. Helping families become self-sufficient, preparing
them for permanent employment and lifting them out of poverty should be the goals of the welfare program.
Congress must allow welfare recipients to receive an appropriate education and training, child care,
transportation and health insurance so they can become self-sufficient.
Wal-Mart sex-bias case could stir up talk, more lawsuits
Format: News Commentary
Source: Michael Kinsman, San Diego Union-Tribune
Date: June 27, 2004
The nation's largest workplace sex discrimination case is supposed to be
about 1.6 million women who work for, or used to work for, Wal-Mart. But it really is about the attitude of
every working American toward women in the workplace. As it unfolds, this case could open up a broader public
awareness of workplace gender discrimination and how it occurs. It should make us all look around, think about
how we conduct ourselves, how our workplaces treat women and what we can do to ensure that gender
discrimination finds no home in our workplaces.
Rights and wrongs: protecting the freedom of association in the American workplace
Format: Political Column
Source: David Bonior, Center for American Progress
Date: June 25, 2004
Protecting the right to organize and collectively bargain is
not simply a workplace issue, but an urgent crisis linked to the preservation of democracy, ideals of justice
and fair play, and the economic security of American families and communities. By attempting to form unions and
negotiate contracts, workers are advancing race and gender equality in the workplace, combating poverty, and
protecting the environment by setting higher health and safety standards. It's time we all stood with workers
and acknowledged that their freedom to form unions and collectively bargain without enduring intimidation,
harassment, and the threat of termination by their employers are rights--not privileges--that must be upheld.
Wal-Mart faces its biggest problem
Format: Political Column
Source: Robert Trigaux, St. Petersburg Times
Date: June 25, 2004
In a long-awaited ruling this week, a federal judge said an employment discrimination lawsuit against
the world's largest retailer can proceed as a class action. The suit covers up to 1.6-million current and
former female workers, [such as] Ramona Scott, Gail Lovejoy, DeAnna Willard, Anna Stumpf and Jenny Williams.
These women say they worked hard at Wal-Marts in the Tampa Bay area. They achieved strong job reviews. But when
they asked for opportunities to advance, they typically found themselves shunted aside, paid less than male
workers with equal or less experience or--when asking management for an explanation--simply given the
runaround. I am struck by the similarity of troubles these five women endured at area Wal-Marts. Their stories
can be found among the nearly 200 court depositions offered up by angry Wal-Mart women across the country.
Job equality doesn't just happen, girls
Format: Editorial
Source: Ellen Goodman, The Oregonian
Date: June 25, 2004
We sometimes forget that the lives of men and women didn't simply passively
evolve. But on July 2, we'll celebrate the 40th anniversary of a powerful engine of this social change, the
Civil Rights Act of 1964. One unexpected word was tucked into Title VII of that landmark legislation banning
racial segregation and discrimination: sex. When President Johnson signed the bill, it became illegal for the
first time to discriminate in employment on the grounds of gender. What had seemed to many like a "natural" way
of treating men and women differently because of their roles in the family and society became what the courts
now call "invidious."
Think again: on the economy, listen to the voters
Format: Political Column
Source: Bill Scher, Center for American Progress
Date: June 24, 2004
Mainstream [media] outlets that point the finger at voters' skepticism are picking up an argument
pushed by some conservatives who want people to think the current state of Bush's economy is worth getting
excited about. Yet what is receiving almost no attention from those pontificating on the economy is the nature
of the growth they so admire. In fact, it demonstrates a massive growth discrepancy between corporate profits
and wages. As the Economic Policy Institute calculated last month, corporate profits have grown by 62 percent
since the first quarter of 2001, but "labor compensation"--which includes paychecks and benefits--grew only 2.8
percent, and "private wage and salary income" fell by 0.6 percent. Voters have good reason to be dissatisfied
with Bush's economy, and many are doing the optimistic thing: demanding better. Instead of trying to tell the
public why it's misguided, the media should delve into why the economy isn't working for many Americans, and
what the solutions might be.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: G Pascal Zachary, Daily Times [Pakistan]
Date: June 24, 2004
Ghana is best known for producing cocoa and gold, but today Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), a
Texas company, is the country's largest private employer. African 'key punchers' earn $4 to $5 a day--four
times the legal minimum wage--and receive health insurance, meals, and subsidized transport. ACS's employees
are but the first Africans to benefit from the hottest trend in the global economy: outsourcing, or the shift
of service jobs from high-wage to low-wage countries. To be sure, the number of jobs moving to Africa is tiny
compared to those going to Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. But the big news is that Africa is finally
competing in the economic contest that is reshaping the world economy.
Wage hike for bottom 5 percent spurs productivity
Format: Editorial
Source: Daytona Beach News-Journal
Date: June 24, 2004
The more purchasing power people gain, the higher the average standard of living, the bigger
the economy. The minimum wage does make labor slightly more expensive, but it also encourages companies to
innovate more by recouping labor costs with efficiency, which raises productivity. John Kerry is proposing to
raise the minimum wage to $7 by 2007, if he's elected. Regardless of who wins in November, a more decent
minimum wage should be a bipartisan priority seen--and sold--for what it is: An overall benefit to the business
climate, but also, and mostly, a necessary pay increase for those who make the least.
Dueling studies support both sides of offshoring debate
Format: News Commentary
Source: Mike Cassidy, Mercury News [California]
Date: June 22, 2004
Consider two reports released this month. One, from the Labor Department, said very few workers
are losing their jobs to offshoring. The other, from management consultancy Foote Partners, said offshoring is
the key reason technology workers' pay is declining. The search for hard statistics misses the larger point.
Offshoring is not an evil in itself. It is part of a bigger issue--the changing compact between employers and
employees. Workers today are being asked to give more and more in return for less and less--less job security,
lower wages, fewer benefits. And while the offshoring debate is often framed as a struggle between U.S. workers
and foreign workers, that's not it at all. Recent history shows that when profits rise, it is not workers who
benefit the most, but rather U.S. companies and their investors.
Format: News Commentary
Source: Lee Drutman, TomPaine.com
Date: June 18, 2004
When former New
York Stock Exchange Chairman and CEO Dick Grasso made headlines last fall for his outrageous $188 million pay
package, it seemed the apotheosis of so much that had gone wrong in corporate America. Today's epidemic of
extravagant executive compensation comes at the expense of economic justice and a sense of shared prosperity.
It offends our sense of decency and fairness. But it is not a law enforcement problem. It is a problem of
corporate governance and old-fashioned cronyism. And until we can find a way to cut through the conflicts of
interest that pervade corporate boardrooms and give shareholders more control, greedy executives will likely
continue to have their way.
What Are They Smoking at the Labor Dept.?
Format: Political Column
Source: John Crudele, New York Post
Date: May 11, 2004
Don't get too excited
about all those new jobs that were supposed to have been created in April. I'm not going to waste a lot of my
precious space on this, but the bottom line is that most of the 288,000 jobs that the Labor Department says
were created last month may not really exist. They could be figments of statisticians' optimism. Anyone who
plodded through my column last Thursday knows I predicted that job growth in April would be better than the
160,000 to 170,000 jobs that the "pros" were anticipating. But I also said, quite emphatically I hope, that the
stronger growth would be an illusion - the result of the Labor Department's computers making happy predictions
about seasonal job creation that could neither be verified nor justified.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Andrew J. Cherlin and Prem Krishnamurthy, New York Times
Date: May 9, 2004
Working mothers get less sleep, watch less TV, spend less time with their children and generally have
less free time than mothers who don't work outside the home. So why are employed mothers more satisfied with
their family lives? The first clue is that, while employed mothers do spend less time with their children than
do other mothers, the difference is far less than is generally believed -- only about five hours a week.
Working mothers clearly protect their family time: even as their free time falls by 32 percent, time with their
children drops by only 16 percent. This leisure gap takes its toll on working mothers, although they compensate
by doing less housework.
Format: Editorial
Source: Washington Post
Date: May 4, 2004
Last year the
Labor Department drew widespread criticism for proposed changes to overtime rules for white-collar workers. We
agreed with critics who said the new rules tilted to employers and risked depriving too many workers of pay to
which they are entitled. Now Labor has revised its proposal, and the new rules, while still worrisome in some
respects, are substantially improved. Unions and their allies, with some basis for being suspicious of this
administration's attitude toward workers in general and the overtime question in particular, argue that the
regulations still would unfairly jeopardize the overtime rights of millions of workers. They are pressing for a
Senate vote, expected today, that would block the rules from taking effect. We think lawmakers should hold off.
If the regulations are inconsistent with the federal law designed to protect the right to overtime pay, they
can be challenged in court. And if employers exploit the regulations to unfairly deny overtime pay to workers,
they, too, are subject to being sued. In the meantime, the new rules offer some significant benefits for
workers.
Maternity Leave is a Sticky Issue
Format: Advice Column
Source: Carrie Mason-Draffen (Newsday), Detroit News
Date: May 3, 2004
Q. We are a company of about 30 people. One of our employees is on maternity leave. When she returns, do we
have to reinstate her to the job she held before the leave? The answer is crucial because her replacement does
a much better job, and we would like to keep her in the position. Can’t we just offer the returning employee
a job in another department?
A. Because of your company’s size, your question doesn’t have easy
answers. You’re too small to fall under the jurisdiction of the federal Family and Medical Leave Act, which
covers companies with at least 50 employees. That act would require you to return the employee to the same
position. On the other hand, you do fall under other antidiscrimination statutes such as the federal Pregnancy
Discrimination Act or New York State human rights laws.
Blindsided by the Boss in Your Annual Review
Format: Advice Column
Source: Cheryl Dahle, New York Times
Date: May 2, 2004
Q. The
boss just shredded your job performance in an annual review. What's worse, the bad news was a surprise. How do
you handle it?
A. First off, don't say anything you'll regret. Muzzle your anger. If you can, buy
yourself some time by suggesting that because you respect the seriousness of the feedback, you prefer to
respond more thoughtfully in a few days. Then consider: Is there a kernel of truth in the evaluation? Be
brutally honest with yourself, says Lois P. Frankel, a psychologist, career coach and author of "Nice Girls
Don't Get the Corner Office: 101 Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers" (Warner Books,
2004).
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Bob Herbert, New York Times
Date: April 26, 2004
The baseball season
was a month old and the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants were fighting for first place in the National
League. A war hero named Eisenhower was president. In London, Winston Churchill was adding his voice to the
cadre of world leaders engaged in the difficult search for a solution to the war in Indo-China. And in
Washington, on Monday, May 17, 1954, a warm and muggy spring day in the nation's capital, history was being
made. "We conclude, unanimously," said Chief Justice Earl Warren, reading from the court's decision in the
case of Oliver Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, "that in the field of public education the
doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." That
ruling, the most profound of the 20th century, was the essential first step toward a difficult but phenomenal
transformation of the American social landscape.
Format: Editorial
Source: Washington Post
Date: April 26, 2004
The decoding of
the human genome opens new prospects for medicine. Genetic testing can determine an individual's
susceptibility to an array of cancers, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's, cystic fibrosis, Huntington's
disease -- the list grows almost daily. Understanding the genetic basis of certain diseases may lead to new
treatments and better preventive care. But this promise is tempered by the risk that individuals' genetic
heritage could be used against them. Employers could refuse to hire, or could fire, those predisposed to
develop a disease. An insurer could refuse coverage, or charge higher premiums, on the basis of genetic
tendency. And the specter of such discrimination could deter people from undergoing genetic testing, thus
potentially undermining their own care and slowing the pace of scientific discovery. Nearly three years ago,
President Bush, echoing a call by his predecessor, urged Congress to pass legislation to prevent discrimination
based on genetic information. "To deny employment or insurance to a healthy person based only on a
predisposition violates our country's belief in equal treatment and individual merit," he said. Last fall the
Senate approved the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act on a 95 to 0 vote after lawmakers, trying to
address business concerns, set limits on the right of victims of genetic discrimination to sue for damages. Now
Republican House leaders are dragging their feet, though a majority of House members have co-sponsored a
version that would go even further than the Senate bill.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times
Date: April 22, 2004
I was just
out in Silicon Valley, checking in with high-tech entrepreneurs about the state of their business. I wouldn't
say they were universally gloomy, but I did detect something I hadn't detected before: a real undertow of
concern that America is losing its competitive edge vis-à-vis China, India, Japan and other Asian tigers, and
that the Bush team is deaf, dumb and blind to this situation. Several executives explained to me that they were
opening new plants in Asia -- not because of cheaper labor. Labor is a small component now in an automated
high-tech manufacturing plant. It is because governments in these countries are so eager for employment and the
transfer of technology to their young populations that they are offering huge tax holidays for U.S.
manufacturers who will set up shop. Because most of these countries also offer some form of national health
insurance, U.S. companies shed that huge open liability as well. Other executives complained bitterly that the
Department of Homeland Security is making it so hard for legitimate foreigners to get visas to study or work in
America that many have given up the age-old dream of coming here. Instead, they are studying in England and
other Western European nations, and even China. This is leading to a twofold disaster.
Format: Editorial
Source: New York Times
Date: April 22, 2004
Mayor Michael Bloomberg drew a
line in the sand on giving retroactive pay raises to city workers shortly after he took office and inherited a
fiscal crisis. That line shifted recently with an improving budget outlook and the need to take care of certain
matters before the 2005 re-election campaign. This week City Hall gave in on the point altogether, agreeing to
pay members of the city's largest municipal workers' union additional money for the two years they have
worked without a contract. Still, in reaching a tentative three-year settlement with the union, the mayor at
least did not give in entirely on another, perhaps more important, principle: that workers must produce savings
to pay for their own wage increases.
No News in Newsroom Census: Gender Gap Persists
Format: News Commentary
Source: Michele Weldon, Women's E-News
Date: April 21, 2004
Ambition defies the
boundaries of gender. Opportunity is less democratic. For women working in daily newspapers across the country,
the crawl toward the goal post of equity continues. The numbers of women on the staffs of daily newspapers in
2003 increased minutely to 37.23 percent of newsroom employees, according to the annual ASNE Newsroom
Employment Census released Tuesday by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The meager improvement from
37.05 percent after a two-year decline in numbers of women in newsrooms forces us to decode the writing on the
wall and choose the appropriate cliche: Is it "slow and steady wins the race?" Or "quit while you still can?"
Should You Stay, or Should You Go?
Format: Advice Column
Source: Cheryl Dahle, New York Times
Date: April 18, 2004
Q. A
workweek from hell is coming up. Your project team has a major deadline, but friends from college have invited
you on a not-to-be-missed ski trip on the weekend just before it. Should you go, and risk coming back
exhausted? Dare you ask for Friday or Monday off?
A. Tough call. No one wants to pass up a raucous
weekend skiing to spend more time slaving away in an office cubicle. Still, a wrong choice could make your
career bear a resemblance to your weekend activities - headed downhill fast.
Now Can We Talk About Health Care?
Format: News Commentary
Source: Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York Times
Date: April 18, 2004
I know
what you're thinking. Hillary Clinton and health care? Been there. Didn't do that! No, it's not 1994; it's
2004. And believe it or not, we have more problems today than we had back then. Issues like soaring health
costs and millions of uninsured have yet to fix themselves. And now we are confronting a new set of challenges
associated with the arrival of the information age, the technological revolution and modern life. Think for a
moment about recent advances in genetic testing. Knowing you are prone to cancer or heart disease or Lou
Gehrig's disease may give you a fighting chance. But just try, with that information in hand, to get health
insurance in a system without strong protections against discrimination for pre-existing or genetic conditions.
Each vaunted scientific breakthrough brings with it new challenges to our health system. But it's not only
medicine that is changing. So, too, are the economy, our personal behaviors and our environment. Unless
Americans across the political spectrum come together to change our health care system, that system, already
buckling under the pressures of today, will collapse with the problems of tomorrow.
Maybe It's Time for Another New Deal
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Louis Uchitelle, New York Times
Date: April 11, 2004
Can
the private sector generate enough jobs to return the United States to full employment? Or must government play
a much greater supporting role in job creation? That question, once hotly debated, is barely mentioned today.
It should be. For 30 years, the assumption has been that the private sector would generate full employment on
its own. It has not, except for a five-year stretch in the late 1990's. Now the situation has become worse.
Despite robust economic growth, the private sector is generating fewer jobs than ever in a recovery.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Paul Krugman, New York Times
Date: April 9, 2004
At last, a
favorable surprise on jobs: estimated payroll employment rose 308,000 in March, above almost everyone's
expectations. You can't blame the administration for trying to play up the good news, and for being dismayed
when the sound of popping Champagne corks was drowned out by the crackle of gunfire. But has the economy, after
so many false starts, finally started to deliver? For perspective, it helps to remember what solid job growth
looks like. During Bill Clinton's eight years in office, the economy added 236,000 jobs per month. But that's
just an average: a graph of monthly changes looks like an electrocardiogram. There were 23 months with 300,000
or more new jobs; in March 2000, the economy added 493,000 jobs. This tells us not to make too much of one
month's data; payroll numbers are, as economists say, noisy. It also tells us that by past standards, March
2004 was nothing special. And we should be seeing something special, because our economy should be on the
rebound.
Format: Editorial
Source: Washington Post
Date: April 8, 2004
Lawmakers considering whether companies should be required to report the value of employee stock options as
expenses on their corporate balance sheets might want to take a look at a new report on the topic from their
own budget office. The Financial Accounting Standards Board, the private body that writes rules for the
accounting industry, has just proposed a rule -- more than a decade in the making -- that would require
companies to show the fair market value of options as expenses. Anti-expensing forces, led by high-tech firms
that rely heavily on options to attract employees, are pressing a measure in Congress that would block the FASB
rule from taking effect. The Congressional Budget Office analysis of the issue is therefore timely -- and just
as important, it's written in language understandable to those without advanced accounting degrees. The CBO
concludes, "If firms do not recognize as an expense the fair value of employee stock options, measured when the
options are granted, the firms' reported net income will be overstated." Under the current rule, firms report
the fair market value of their options, but they can tuck the number in the notes appended to their financial
statements and not count it against profits. If options were treated like other compensation costs, the CBO
notes, analysts and investors would be able to more easily assess a company's compensation practices and how
those affect its profits; likewise, that "improved transparency would also aid corporate committees that
approve managers' compensation packages."
Format: Editorial
Source: New York Times
Date: April 6, 2004
As the Bush administration
focuses attention on ex-offenders with its modest program to help them return to the community, an eye-opening
new study shows that the effort will require a lot more than re-entry programs. Not only do all 50 states
continue to punish and marginalize convicts after they leave jail, but most also have laws that punish millions
of people for crimes for which they were never convicted. The new study, from the Legal Action Center, a
criminal justice policy group, identifies laws in all 50 states that hamper former offenders' ability to
re-enter society. These excessively punitive laws, which must be modified or repealed before ex-convicts have a
real chance at jobs, homes and mainstream lives, bar them from scores of professions that require state
licenses but are unrelated to their crimes. The study, which will soon be available on the Web, ranks the
states based on the stringency of laws that bar former offenders from whole professions, or strip them of
driver's licenses, parental rights and the right to vote.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: David Brooks, New York Times
Date: April 3, 2004
If you were
obsessed with the political campaign over the past year, you would have gotten the impression that there's no
such thing as a service sector of the economy -- it's all manufacturing -- and that the U.S. is getting
trounced by China and India in the competition for global business. That's a distorted view of reality. Since
1995, the U.S. has enjoyed a productivity renaissance. The McKinsey Global Institute breaks the economy down
into 60 sectors. U.S. workers are the most productive on earth in at least 50 of them. Productivity gains cause
standard of living increases. Productivity gains lead to employment gains. If history is any judge,
yesterday's excellent job numbers could mark the beginning of another surge in job creation. As William W.
Lewis, a former McKinsey partner, writes in "The Power of Productivity," about half the U.S. productivity gains
have occurred in just two sectors, wholesale and retail trade. We've gotten really efficient at getting stuff
from the hands of manufacturers to the hands of consumers. These innovations have had more important effects on
how people really live than anything done in Washington.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Joseph Loconte , New York Times
Date: April 1, 2004
The United
Nations Commission on Human Rights, the world's most important political body devoted to human rights
concerns, is halfway through its deliberations here. Each year delegates from the 53 member states meet for six
weeks to name the worst offending countries and adopt resolutions condemning their abuses. For years, however,
the commission instead has been a haven for rogue governments -- who get elected to the body in order to shield
themselves from international scrutiny and criticism. The failure of international leadership has become
increasingly intolerable, especially in an age when terrorism and repressive regimes go hand in hand. Indeed,
the Commission on Human Rights no longer can be counted on to "name and shame" even the most egregious
violators.
Format: Editorial
Source: New York Times
Date: April 1, 2004
The Age Discrimination in
Employment Act was intended to protect older workers from bias. Federal courts, however, have frequently given
the law an unduly narrow interpretation, leaving older Americans vulnerable to unfair treatment. This week, the
Supreme Court accepted a case that can rectify this problem -- if it decides that older workers can rely on the
same burden of proof as plaintiffs in cases of race and sex bias. Doing otherwise would leave millions of
working Americans who are 40 or older vulnerable to mistreatment. The age-bias law's text almost exactly
tracks the language of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars race and sex discrimination. Under
Title VII, plaintiffs can make their case by showing "disparate impact" -- that is, that an employer's actions
have an unequal impact on their group. After such a showing, the employer has the burden of proving that its
supposedly neutral policy serves a legitimate purpose. The disparate-impact standard is important because it is
often impossible to prove an employer's intent to discriminate.
Community of Character: Fairness in the Workplace
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Herbert Hughes, Cordele Dispatch (GA)
Date: March 26, 2004
How many times have you heard someone working with you exclaim: "It's just not fair"? Have you ever
stopped and thought about what's fair and what isn't? It can become quite confusing. What's fair to one
won't seem fair to another. Being fair would mean that everyone shared equally in all things, and we know that
doesn't happen. Some people will always do more work than others. Some will always be asked to do more than
others. Is that fair? It depends. Is the one doing the extra work being compensated for it? If so, you could
say it was fair. As an employee, what can you expect in the way of fairness? Here are a few thoughts: You
should have the same opportunity for raises and promotions as any employee. If you do the same quantity of
work, the same quality of work and have the same qualifications as another employee you should expect to
receive the same privileges and compensation as that employee. You should be treated as an equal with that
employee. That's all you can ask.
It's Jobs, Stupid, and Tax Cuts, Too
Format: News Commentary
Source: John Mercurio, CNN
Date: March 26, 2004
With his party $11 million
richer from last night's unity dinner, John Kerry travels to Michigan today to take a whack at the soft spot
in President Bush's economic recovery -- jobs. In the first major policy address since he clinched his
party's nod, Kerry hits back at new Bush ads that claim Kerry has backed some 350 tax hikes in the Senate,
while he offers a plan to create 10 million jobs by 2009. In the first of three speeches he'll deliver in
coming weeks, Kerry today appears at Wayne University in Detroit to outline a tax reform plan designed to
encourage job creation. In the second speech, which sources say is scheduled for sometime early next month,
Kerry will unveil his plan to give Americans the education and training and skills they need to fill and create
21st century jobs. In the third speech, Kerry will outline his plan to restore fiscal discipline and confidence
in the American economy.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Newt Gingrich, Washington Post
Date: March 25, 2004
The Democrats think they've found the perfect one-sided debate by presenting themselves as
the party that opposes "outsourcing" of American jobs. They hope the Republican Party will be dumb enough to
take the bait and be the side that favors outsourcing. That kind of binary argument, in which the Republicans
take the role of defending the loss of jobs overseas, would be a dead loser for the GOP. Republicans must set
up a new, winning argument by focusing not on the loss of old jobs but on the creation of new ones.
How Dangerous Employees Continue to Get New Jobs
Format: Editorial
Source: USA Today
Date: March 23, 2004
Co-workers often complained about
Charles Cullen, a nurse suspected of killing dozens of patients in New Jersey and Pennsylvania with drug
overdoses. He'd been fired by several hospitals and nursing homes, left others under a cloud and had known
mental problems that included three suicide attempts. Prosecutors investigated him about suspicious deaths
dating back to 1993, but no charges were filed. Instead, Cullen easily found new nursing jobs. Why? Former
employers didn't share their suspicions with persons checking references, and state health agencies couldn't
legally reveal pending inquiries about him. As a result, Cullen wasn't arrested until December, after
authorities found that at least two patients at a Somerville, N.J., hospital received overdoses of drugs that
hadn't been prescribed. Cullen was charged with murder and attempted murder. Detectives say he admitted
killing 30 to 40 patients during 16 years to ''alleviate their suffering.'' Cullen's case is an extreme
example. But reticence by businesses and governments that give job references is standard.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Todd Buchholz, New York Times
Date: March 19, 2004
The gross domestic
product is going up, but hiring looks sluggish. Credit cards bills go unpaid, but big-screen TV's are flying
off the shelves. With statistics so contradictory, maybe economists should ditch their spreadsheets for dart
boards. Let's leave aside all the estimates and extrapolations for a moment and ask a simple question that may
help cut through all the confusion: if you were a manager, why would you hire a human being instead of a
machine? Humans get sick. They daydream. And they take coffee breaks. The cost of capital equipment, meanwhile,
from laptop computers to lathes, has plummeted since 1995. Moreover, the cost of leasing and financing new
tools has fallen to the lowest levels since, well, before there were laptops and lathes. At the same time,
federal tax policy has been tilted toward capital spending, with taxes on most dividends and capital gains
falling to 15 percent. Changes in the tax law two years ago allow small businesses to write off $100,000 in new
equipment immediately, while big firms get a temporary 50 percent write-off. People, however, remain relatively
expensive.
Questioning Free Trade Mathematics
Format: News Commentary
Source: Jeff Madrick, New York Times
Date: March 18, 2004
Free trade theory
has a growing number of detractors, and one of their traditional concerns has understandably moved to center
stage in this presidential election year. How much has the exporting of jobs to foreign nations contributed to
the lack of jobs and the absence of wage growth in the current expansion at home? The standard tenets of free
trade theory strongly support the case for outsourcing. Generally, as business finds cheaper ways to make
products, it reduces prices to consumers. And some businesses may not survive unless they can reduce labor
costs. In general, most economists believe that the "consumer surplus" that results from lower prices far
outweighs the cost of lost jobs or lower wages. In other words, there are many more winners than losers. But
recent research suggests that the magnitude of this advantage has been exaggerated. Also, the plight of the
losers has clearly been sorely neglected in the economic literature.
A Mother's Place Is in the Women's Movement
Format: News Commentary
Source: Elizabeth Bauchner , Women's e-News
Date: March 10, 2004
The 1970s
women's liberation movement, or Second Wave of Feminism, necessarily focused on getting women out of the house
and into the paid work force. That movement largely ignored the needs of mothers regardless if they worked
outside the home or did not. The unintended result of that is that mothers now find it harder than ever to
provide meaningful care for their young children. That should be corrected now, while the political sun shines
during campaign season. The women's movement should rally itself and fight for mothers' rights and put child
care into the spotlight. Mothers should let our policy makers know what we want and need.
Format: News Commentary
Source: Kathleen Hays, CNN/Money
Date: March 9, 2004
We all
know that consumer spending makes up about two-thirds of the nation's gross domestic product (the sum of all
spending basically), and that's why it's so important to the economic and financial outlook. Right now, the
outlook isn't bad, but it isn't all that great. Chain store sales fell by 0.3% in the week ended March 6
after being flat the previous week, according to the survey done by Mike Niemira at the International Council
of Shopping Centers. That sounds pretty lackluster until you look at the year-over-year comparison, up 7.0%.
The main problem with the year-over-year comparison is that last year we were on the verge of the war in Iraq
and consumers were paralyzed, waiting for the conflict to start, wondering how bad it would be, fearing how
long it might last. On a less dramatic note, warmer weather helped sales with the nation's average temperature
about ten degrees higher than usual. The big question is where are we heading if jobs aren't picking up?
Opinion: How Can We Breed or Keep Jobs at Home?
Format: Political Column
Source: Robert Landauer, Oregonian
Date: March 9, 2004
Job exports will be a hot topic until Election Day on Nov. 2. Here are
authorities who replied to my request for ideas that would allow the connected issues of domestic job
generation and offshore outsourcing of jobs to serve the long-term interests of the U.S. economy and its
workers.
Format: Editorial
Source: Washington Post
Date: March 9, 2004
At
the height of the late 1990s boom, corporate-governance advocates used to travel the country, pleading with
U.S. attorneys to prosecute executives who had defrauded shareholders. The prosecutors generally retorted that
corporate malfeasance was too unglamorous to justify the effort of trying complex cases. Now, however,
executives from Enron to Adelphia to WorldCom have been hauled into court, and the examples may deter future
theft from investors. But pendulums that swing one way generally swing back. Hence the importance of two
regulatory debates that come to a head today and tomorrow. Today's action takes place at the audit oversight
board created as a result of the landmark Sarbanes-Oxley law passed in 2002. The board is set to vote on a rule
that requires firms to strengthen their internal financial controls and requires outside auditors to verify
that these controls are robust. Of all the provisions in the Sarbanes-Oxley law, this may be the most expensive
to firms; according to one complaining report, companies with revenue over $5 billion expect to pay an average
of $4.7 million in the first year of implementation. Lobbyists have pressured the audit board to relax the
rule, even though the compliance costs look reasonable when set against the cost to investors of dishonest
accounting and even though compliance will grow cheaper once companies put in place the financial controls that
they should have adopted long ago, without regulatory prompting. To its credit, the oversight board has stood
firm against the lobbyists. Today's vote is expected to go in favor of financial honesty.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Paul Krugman, New York Times
Date: March 9, 2004
Despite a string of
dismal employment reports, the administration insists that its economic program, which has relied entirely on
tax cuts focused on the affluent, will produce big job gains any day now. Should we believe these promises?
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Bob Herbert, New York Times
Date: March 8, 2004
The Bush crowd
couldn't have been more pleased with the timing of the Martha Stewart verdict on Friday afternoon. The big
news heading into the weekend was almost guaranteed to be the awful jobs report released by the Labor
Department Friday morning. The White House needed a world-class distraction and the Stewart jury, eager to wrap
things up before the weekend, obliged. It strolled in, as if on cue, with a verdict of guilty on all counts.
Distractions don't get much bigger. The Labor Department report was as grim as faces on a bread line. Despite
all the president's promises, the economy added just 21,000 jobs last month. No jobs were added by the private
sector. The 21,000 additional jobs were all government hires. The report also showed that job growth in
December and January was worse than previously believed. The January tally was revised from 112,000 to 97,000.
The December count dropped from 16,000 to a pathetic 8,000.
Fly High Above the Battlefield
Format: Editorial
Source: Stanley B. Greenberg, New York Times
Date: March 7, 2004
While John
Kerry was vanquishing his Democratic opponents and rising in the national polls, the Republican Party was
arming for battle. The president's campaign broadcast its first television advertisements last week, and they
depicted George Bush as a steady leader. Mr. Kerry and the Democrats, meanwhile, will be deciding in the next
few weeks which issues to embrace in the coming campaign. Republicans have already begun fighting a culture
war; Democrats have begun fighting a class war. One party is talking about gay marriage, the other about
corporate greed. But Mr. Kerry should not settle for a campaign waged on such narrow terms. In 2004, Americans
are eager to be engaged in matters of greater significance both to the nation and to their everyday lives. This
election will be decided by those voters who care about more than just this debate -- those who do not like
either Rosie O'Donnell or Kenneth Lay. To break the current political impasse and appeal to these voters, Mr.
Kerry should portray this election as a choice between different visions of America. His campaign will surely
reflect Democrats' middle-class sensibilities, and be aligned with them, but Mr. Kerry should also take up the
public's yearning for opportunity, community, loyalty and patriotism.
Productivity and Jobs: The Political Vagaries
Format: News Commentary
Source: Daniel Gross, New York Times
Date: March 7, 2004
If you're a socialite, you can never be too thin or too rich. And if you're an economy, you can never be too
productive. Productivity - the measure of how much labor it takes to create a product or service - is a measure
of our collective wealth. An economy that can do more with the same amount of human resources enjoys a higher
standard of living in the long run. And for the American economy, the recent productivity boom has been a
competitive advantage. Nonfarm productivity rose 4.4 percent in 2003 after a 5.0 percent gain in 2002. But in
the short term, elevated productivity can mean slower job creation. And now that political consultants are
watching monthly jobs figures with the same intensity as economists do, many people in Washington are wishing
that American companies would stop being so darn efficient. As of January, some 2.3 million payroll jobs have
been lost in the United States since January 2001. If they are not regained by next January, President Bush
will be the first president since Herbert Hoover to see the number of payroll jobs decline during his four-year
term.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times
Date: March 6, 2004
The business
world finally cracked down this week on one of the world's biggest welfare moochers, dragging Michael Eisner
out of the chairman's seat at the Walt Disney Company. Probably the only thing that allows Mr. Eisner to hold
on to the job of chief executive is that he has been so incompetent -- or shrewd? -- that he has failed to
cultivate not only profits, but also a successor. The larger question is not why the Disney board allowed Mr.
Eisner to run the company nearly into the ground. Rather, it is why it has paid him $285 million since 1996 to
do that. You'd think that the board could have found a chairman to mismanage Disney for only, say, $2 million
a year. But corporate boards routinely overpay for mediocrity. Indeed, while corporate America ruthlessly
applies capitalism to shave costs in acquiring paper clips or secretaries, the top executive suites tend to be,
along with North Korea, the world's last enclaves of socialism.
Format: Editorial
Source: Washington Post
Date: March 4, 2004
Nobody can say for sure how many U.S. jobs will be "offshored" to places such as India, but the best estimates
are around 3.5 million between now and 2015. If that number sounds scary, try this one: The total number of
U.S. jobs destroyed over the same period is likely to be well over 300 million. Capitalism eliminates jobs
constantly, but except during recessions it creates new ones even more quickly: In 1999 alone, 33 million jobs
were destroyed and 36 million created. In short, the loss of a few hundred thousand jobs per year to offshoring
is a small part of the churning that goes on in the U.S. labor market. Precisely because every job loss is
painful, it makes more sense to think of ways of stimulating employment generally than to craft legislation to
address 1 percent of the problem.
Format: News Commentary
Source: Kathleen Hays, CNN/Money
Date: March 4, 2004
The
monthly chain store numbers today are confirming what we've been seeing -- and writing about -- in the recent
weekly numbers from the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC): a nice jump in spending at department
stores, specialty retailers and discounters in the month of February. One conclusion easy to reach is that with
many Americans getting bigger tax refunds (an average increase of $500 is expected) or at the very least
sending smaller tax payments to the government, people are feeling extra change jangling in their pockets and
spending it! The harder factor to gauge is the labor market. Jobless claims have come down to around 350,000 a
week, a level considered consistent with improvement in the employment outlook but not with out-and-out
healing.
Attire Too Sexy? Employers Can Ban It
Format: Advice Column
Source: Carol Kleiman, Chicago Tribune
Date: March 4, 2004
Ban on "sexy" dressing: "Courts around the country, mostly federal courts
governing states such as Illinois and California, are permitting businesses to ban what employers call "sexy"
dressing in the workplace," reports Eric Matusewitch, deputy director of the New York City Equal Employment
Practices Commission. And what is "sexy?" Matusewitch, who has worked on equal employment opportunity issues
for 20 years, says the courts put it this way: "It's considered attire that is particularly revealing and of
extreme fit, such as spandex, and also use of excessive makeup." In response to charges by female employees
that such codes discriminate against women, Matusewitch points out that "courts are holding that employers have
a right to set reasonable dress and appearance codes.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times
Date: February 29, 2004
Indians are
so hospitable. I got an ovation the other day from a roomful of Indian 20-year-olds just for reading perfectly
the following paragraph: "A bottle of bottled water held 30 little turtles. It didn't matter that each turtle
had to rattle a metal ladle in order to get a little bit of noodles, a total turtle delicacy. The problem was
that there were many turtle battles for less than oodles of noodles." I was sitting in on an "accent
neutralization" class at the Indian call center 24/7 Customer. The instructor was teaching the would-be Indian
call center operators to suppress their native Indian accents and speak with a Canadian one -- she teaches
British and U.S. accents as well, but these youths will be serving the Canadian market. Since I'm originally
from Minnesota, near Canada, and still speak like someone out of the movie "Fargo," I gave these young Indians
an authentic rendition of "30 Little Turtles," which is designed to teach them the proper Canadian
pronunciations. Hence the rousing applause.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Paul Krugman, New York Times
Date: February 27, 2004
You can't blame
the Democrats for making the most of the Bush administration's message malfunction on trade and jobs. When the
president's top economist suggests, even hypothetically, considering hamburger-flipping a form of
manufacturing, it's a golden opportunity to accuse the White House of being out of touch with the concerns of
working Americans. ("Will special sauce now be counted as a durable good?" Representative John Dingell asks.)
And the accusation sticks, because it's true. But the Democratic presidential candidates have to walk a
tightrope. To exploit the administration's vulnerability, they must offer relief to threatened workers. But
they also have to avoid falling into destructive protectionism.
Workers' Rights Are Being Rolled Back
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post
Date: February 25, 2004
While the Bush administration is gung-ho for democracy in Iraq and Zimbabwe, there is one place it wants to be
sure it never sees the light of day: the American workplace. I am talking here about a right that most
Americans thought they won back in 1935 -- the right to form unions and bargain collectively. Over the years,
that right has been whittled away by legislation, poked with holes by appeals courts and reduced to irrelevancy
by a well-meaning bureaucracy that has let itself be intimidated by political and legal thuggery. As a result,
any company willing to use intimidation and delaying tactics will never have to sign a first contract with a
union, even if employees really want one.
Online commentary on Steven Pearlstein's column:
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2282-2004Feb24.html">The Lost Right to Unionize
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Bob Herbert, New York Times
Date: February 23, 2004
Welcome to the 21st
century. The landscape has changed. We're in a new hypercompetitive worldwide economy, driven by breathtaking
advances in technology. Men and women are being added to the global work force by the hundreds of millions. In
this dynamic, potentially very treacherous labor market, few people are looking out for the interests of the
American worker. The very concept of the traditional high-paid American job, with its generous health and
pension benefits and paid vacations, is at risk. Senator Charles Schumer of New York sees the economic changes
as a paradigm shift. In an era of high-bandwith communications and the free flow of capital, most goods and
services can be produced or performed anywhere in the world. And with highly educated workers in countries like
China and India ready and able to perform sophisticated tasks at a fraction of the pay earned by Americans,
there are fewer and fewer reasons for those American jobs not to take flight. In light of these changes, said
Senator Schumer, we should at least be asking some tough questions about the real-world effects of free trade
as we've known it.
Format: Editorial
Source: Washington Post
Date: February 23, 2004
Five months into fiscal 2004, the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services has announced that it is
no longer accepting applications for H-1B "business" visas, which are issued to educated foreign professionals.
The number of visas is capped, by Congress, at 65,000. As of last week, 65,000 visas had already been granted.
For the past few years, larger numbers of visas were issued -- 78,000 in fiscal 2002, and 79,000 in fiscal 2003
-- because the cap had been temporarily raised in the late 1990s to a possible 195,000 to accommodate the
demand for foreign computer and tech workers. The raised cap then lapsed, but the demand, while never as high
as some had predicted, has not lapsed along with it. The holders of H-1B visas are the forgotten face of the
foreign work force. By definition, they make nonsense of the prejudice that all foreign workers are low-wage
service workers who speak little English.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times
Date: February 22, 2004
We grew up
with the hippies in the 1960's. Thanks to the high-tech revolution, many of us became yuppies in the 1980's.
And now, fasten your seat belt, because you may soon lose your job to a "zippie" in the 2000's. "The Zippies
Are Here," declared the Indian weekly magazine Outlook. Zippies are this huge cohort of Indian youth who are
the first to come of age since India shifted away from socialism and dived headfirst into global trade, the
information revolution and turning itself into the world's service center. Outlook calls India's zippies
"Liberalization's Children," and defines one as "a young city or suburban resident, between 15 and 25 years of
age, with a zip in the stride. Belongs to generation Z. Can be male or female, studying or working. Oozes
attitude, ambition and aspiration. Cool, confident and creative. Seeks challenges, loves risks and shuns
fears." Indian zippies carry no guilt about making money or spending it. They are, says one Indian analyst
quoted by Outlook, destination driven, not destiny driven; outward, not inward, looking; upwardly mobile, not
stuck-in-my-station-in-life.
Format: News Commentary
Source: Edmund L. Andrews, New York Times
Date: February 22, 2004
For
more than a year, Bush administration officials and Republicans in Congress have seized on an intriguing
statistical puzzle to suggest that job creation in the United States may be much stronger than it appears at
first glance. The puzzle is the enormous divergence between the two surveys that are used by the Bureau of
Labor Statistics to measure job creation and unemployment. The payroll survey, which is based on a monthly poll
of 400,000 employers, shows a loss of more than two million jobs since 2001. The household survey, based on
questions posed to people in 50,000 households, shows an increase of more than 500,000 jobs over the same
period. If the payroll survey is correct, Mr. Bush is on track to be the first president since Herbert Hoover
to complete a term in office with fewer jobs than when he started. If the household survey is correct, Mr. Bush
can claim credit for creating jobs despite the blows of a recession, terrorist attacks and two wars.
Format: Op-Ed
Source: Bob Herbert, New York Times
Date: