I’ve added it to my blogroll, but it really deserves its own post. Nathan Newman has joined the borg at TPMCafe and is blogging up a storm about labor issues, along with a host of other excellent contributors. TPMCafe already has Warren Reports, under the aegis of Elizabeth Warren, which focuses on the difficulties faced [...]
The opposite-of-indubitable Tom Friedman has been raving about Ireland lately. How rich it is, and now how its labor system should be admired for its brutality. If he was right, I’d perhaps be willing to assume that the unprotected workers in the “anglo-saxon” labor system are better off; but he’s dead wrong. Point One: Ireland [...]
I’ve long believed that the main purpose of outsourcing is not to save money by finding cheaper labor, but to save money by keeping labor costs down at home. In other words, it serves as a means of disciplining local labor so that they don’t make demands for increased pay or benefits. So I was [...]
From an article in Zmag: [Anthropologist] David Graeber, was fired from Yale University a few days ago. Of course, that wasn’t the official explanation. The official one reads that “his contract wasn’t renewed” because of his lack of “collegiality”. If you would allow me to translate this: the “lack of collegiality” that David had showed [...]
More of New York City’s working poor are using food stamps: Even as welfare rolls have dropped, food stamp use has increased over the last few years, fueled by a surprising spike among the working class. While overall food stamp use has gone up by more than one-third since 2002, the number of recipients who [...]
Another victory for students fighting to improve workers’ rights! The second one this month. A groundbreaking agreement improving workers’ rights at Washington University was finalized Friday, April 22 ending the 19-day sit-in by members of Washington University’s Student Worker Alliance (SWA). The Wash. U. sit-in was the second longest sit-in in the recent history of [...]
This is a message for all those members of the American Anthropology Association out there: I admit it, I normally throw my AAA ballot in the circular file. But this year I didn’t, because I knew that there were some important labor related issues at stake. However, as I sat down to vote, I realized [...]
A recent compendium and analysis of U.S. labor market statistics, the State of Working America, has some interesting data that is relevant to the passing of the new bankruptcy law. Bush is eager to promote the bill as good for poor people, but the statistics show a society divided between those who own assets and [...]
Graduate student teachers at Yale and Columbia universities are on strike to demand the right to form a union (recently denied to private schools by the NLRB): Graduate teachers at Bush’s alma mater, Yale, together with graduate teachers at Columbia University are fighting back against this ruling. Refusing to cede their internationally recognized human right [...]
Mark Liberman, commenting on a story that the FAA is considering lifting the ban on in-flight cell phone use, points out that the problem is not that there will be more conversation on the airplanes, but the specific nature of the conversations: As I’ve observed before, there’s something funny about this. People do still have [...]