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source: Chicago Breaking Business
Caterpillar threatens to leave Illinois over taxes
By Dow Jones Newswires-Wall Street Journal
Posted March 26 at 4:44 p.m.
Caterpillar Inc., suggesting that it could shift jobs out of Illinois, is prodding its home state to cut government spending and roll back tax increases.
Doug Oberhelman, chief executive officer of the giant Peoria-based maker of construction and mining equipment, protested against the state’s tax and spending policies in a March 21 letter to Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat who took office in January 2009.
“I want to stay here,” the letter said. “But as the leader of this business, I have to do what’s right for Caterpillar when making decisions about where to invest. The direction that this state is headed in is not favorable to business, and I’d like to work with you to change that.”
In the letter, first reported Friday by the Lee Enterprises newspaper chain and provided to The Wall Street Journal Saturday, Oberhelman said other states have stepped up their efforts to lure Caterpillar investments since Illinois raised income tax rates in January.
A spokeswoman for Gov. Quinn said he “welcomes frank and open exchanges between the business community and government” and will discuss the matter with Oberhelman at a meeting soon.
In January, the state’s General Assembly passed a Quinn-supported bill imposing a four-year increase in income taxes designed to reap $6.8 billion in added revenue and help the state balance its budget. The legislation raised the flat rate for personal income taxes to 5 percent from 3 percent and for corporate taxes to 7 percent from 4.8 percent. In 2015, both taxes are set to decline but remain above the prior rate.
Mr. Oberhelman enclosed letters from governors or other officials in Texas, Nebraska, Virginia and South Dakota, all citing the recent Illinois tax increase and urging Caterpillar to invest in what they described as more business-friendly environments.
“If Illinois doesn’t want your business, Texas does,” wrote Rick Perry, the governor of that state.
The governor of Nebraska, Dave Heineman, wrote: “In Nebraska, we balance our budget by controlling spending, not by raising taxes.”
An official in the South Dakota governor’s office chimed in: “In South Dakota, you make a profit, and you keep your profit.”
The Illinois tax increase will cost Caterpillar’s 23,000 employees in the state about $40 million this year, said Jim Dugan, the company’s chief spokesman. Higher taxes make it harder for Caterpillar to attract and retain engineers, accountants and other employees, Dugan said. He added that Caterpillar’s corporate taxes in the state also will increase but provided no estimate on the added cost.
“The state unfortunately continues to put off the tough decisions” about potential reductions in government spending and pension costs, Dugan said. He said Caterpillar was offering to advise the governor on cost-cutting based on the company’s own experience chopping pay and laying off workers during the 2008-09 recession.
Caterpillar’s 23,000 employees in Illinois account for about 22 percent of its global work force. In recent years, the company has done much of its investing in other parts of the U.S., mainly in areas where unions are weak, as well as in Asia and Latin America.
Last August, Caterpillar announced plans to build a $120 million plant to make excavators in Victoria, Texas. Caterpillar also announced last year plans for a new plant in Winston-Salem, N.C., to produce axles for mining machinery; expansion of a Sanford, N.C., construction-equipment plant, and a new engineering-design center in Rapid City, S.D. But the company also is increasing its capacity for making mining trucks in Decatur and has been investing in various other plants near Peoria, Dugan said.
Caterpillar threatens to leave Illinois over taxes
By Dow Jones Newswires-Wall Street Journal
Posted March 26 at 4:44 p.m.
Caterpillar Inc., suggesting that it could shift jobs out of Illinois, is prodding its home state to cut government spending and roll back tax increases.
Doug Oberhelman, chief executive officer of the giant Peoria-based maker of construction and mining equipment, protested against the state’s tax and spending policies in a March 21 letter to Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat who took office in January 2009.
“I want to stay here,” the letter said. “But as the leader of this business, I have to do what’s right for Caterpillar when making decisions about where to invest. The direction that this state is headed in is not favorable to business, and I’d like to work with you to change that.”
In the letter, first reported Friday by the Lee Enterprises newspaper chain and provided to The Wall Street Journal Saturday, Oberhelman said other states have stepped up their efforts to lure Caterpillar investments since Illinois raised income tax rates in January.
A spokeswoman for Gov. Quinn said he “welcomes frank and open exchanges between the business community and government” and will discuss the matter with Oberhelman at a meeting soon.
In January, the state’s General Assembly passed a Quinn-supported bill imposing a four-year increase in income taxes designed to reap $6.8 billion in added revenue and help the state balance its budget. The legislation raised the flat rate for personal income taxes to 5 percent from 3 percent and for corporate taxes to 7 percent from 4.8 percent. In 2015, both taxes are set to decline but remain above the prior rate.
Mr. Oberhelman enclosed letters from governors or other officials in Texas, Nebraska, Virginia and South Dakota, all citing the recent Illinois tax increase and urging Caterpillar to invest in what they described as more business-friendly environments.
“If Illinois doesn’t want your business, Texas does,” wrote Rick Perry, the governor of that state.
The governor of Nebraska, Dave Heineman, wrote: “In Nebraska, we balance our budget by controlling spending, not by raising taxes.”
An official in the South Dakota governor’s office chimed in: “In South Dakota, you make a profit, and you keep your profit.”
The Illinois tax increase will cost Caterpillar’s 23,000 employees in the state about $40 million this year, said Jim Dugan, the company’s chief spokesman. Higher taxes make it harder for Caterpillar to attract and retain engineers, accountants and other employees, Dugan said. He added that Caterpillar’s corporate taxes in the state also will increase but provided no estimate on the added cost.
“The state unfortunately continues to put off the tough decisions” about potential reductions in government spending and pension costs, Dugan said. He said Caterpillar was offering to advise the governor on cost-cutting based on the company’s own experience chopping pay and laying off workers during the 2008-09 recession.
Caterpillar’s 23,000 employees in Illinois account for about 22 percent of its global work force. In recent years, the company has done much of its investing in other parts of the U.S., mainly in areas where unions are weak, as well as in Asia and Latin America.
Last August, Caterpillar announced plans to build a $120 million plant to make excavators in Victoria, Texas. Caterpillar also announced last year plans for a new plant in Winston-Salem, N.C., to produce axles for mining machinery; expansion of a Sanford, N.C., construction-equipment plant, and a new engineering-design center in Rapid City, S.D. But the company also is increasing its capacity for making mining trucks in Decatur and has been investing in various other plants near Peoria, Dugan said.
source: Infowars
“Labor Day” should be renamed “Corporation Day” or “War Day”
It is Labor Day weekend, 2011, but labor has nothing to celebrate. The jobs that once gave American workers a stake in capitalism have left and gone away. Corporations in pursuit of near-term profits have moved labor’s jobs to China, India, Indonesia, Taiwan, South Korea and Eastern Europe.
Labor arbitrage, that is, the substitution of foreign labor that is paid less than its productivity for American labor, has enriched Wall Street, shareholders and corporate CEOs, but it has devastated American employment, household incomes, tax base, and the outlook for the US economy.
This Labor Day week-end’s job report, announced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Friday, September 2, says zero net new jobs were created in August, a number 250,000 less than the amount of monthly job creation necessary to make progress in reducing America’s high rate of unemployment.
The zero figure is actually an optimistic number. As John Williams (shadowstats.com) has made clear, problems with the BLS’s seasonal adjustments and “birth-death” model during the prolonged downturn that began in December 2007 result in the BLS over-estimating new jobs and underestimating lost jobs.
Seasonal adjustments and the “birth-death” model were designed with a growing economy in mind and result in miscounts during downturns. For example, the “birth-death” model estimates new jobs that are created from new start-up companies that are not yet reporting, and it estimates the job losses from companies that have gone out of business. In a growing economy, start-ups exceed jobs losses, but the situation reverses during downturns or during periods of sub-normal job growth. For the past forty-four months, the “birth-death” model has overestimated the number of new jobs created. When the annual revisions are made to the job reports, the excess jobs are taken out, but it is seldom headline news.
The reason that nearly four years of economic stimulus, consisting of large federal budget deficits and near zero interest rates, hasn’t revived the economy is that the jobs that Americans once had have been moved offshore. Stimulus cannot put Americans back to work in jobs that have been given to foreign countries.
Post-World War II Keynesian economists, such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich, think that if the federal government would add more stimulus by enlarging the already massive federal deficit, new jobs would somehow be created to take the place of those that have left. This is a delusion. Not only have the supply chains necessary to support US economic activity been disrupted and broken by offshoring, but also the same incentive–excess supplies of foreign labor that produces more value than it is paid–that sent jobs abroad is still operative.
In a word, the US economy has been de-industrializing, moving from a developed to an underdeveloped economy, for the past two decades. It has been the case for many years that when the US economy manages to eke out new jobs, they are in non-tradable domestic services, such as health care and social assistance, waitresses and bar tenders, retail clerks. Non-tradable employment consists of jobs that do not produce goods and services that could be exported to reduce the large US trade deficit.
The long-term deterioration in the US economy has been covered up by “reforming” the official measures of unemployment and inflation. The U3 measure of unemployment, the current 9.1% unemployment rate, only measures unemployment among those who are actively seeking a job. Those who have become discouraged by the inability to find a job and have ceased looking are not counted as being among the unemployed, and the U3 measure makes no adjustment for those who are forced into part-time jobs because there is no full-time employment.
The government knows that the U3 “headline” unemployment rate is seriously understated and provides a broader measure known as U6. This measure, which is seldom reported by the financial media, includes short-term discouraged workers (those who have not looked for jobs for six months or less) and an adjustment for those who wish full time employment but can only find part time work. Currently, this measure of unemployment stands at 16.2%.
In 1994 the Clinton “progressive” administration defined long-term discouraged workers out of existence. Consequently, no official unemployment rate includes long-term (more than six months) discouraged workers as unemployed. John Williams estimates this number and adds it to the U6 measure to produce a current rate of US unemployment of 22.7%, an unemployment rate 2.5 times higher than the official rate.
Similar understatement exists in the measure of inflation known as the Consumer Price Index. In order to reduce cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security checks and to hold down other inflation adjustments, the “progressive” Clinton administration accepted the Boskin Commission’s recommendation to introduce substitution into what had been a fixed, weighted, basket of goods used to measure the cost of a constant standard of living. In the new “reformed” measure, if the price of an item increases, say New York strip steak, the index assumes that consumers switch to a less expensive cut, such as round steak. Thus, the price increase doesn’t show up in the CPI.
Consumers, or a number of them, do tend to behave in this way. However, since the basket of goods comprising the CPI is no longer constant, but changes with price changes, the CPI has become a variable measure of the cost of living that reduces the inflation rate by measuring a lower standard of living.
John Williams estimates the CPI according to the previous official methodology that used a fixed basket of goods. He finds the rate of inflation to be much higher than is reported by the substitution-based methodology.http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts
The understatement of inflation serves to boost real Gross Domestic Product growth. In order to compare how much larger (or smaller) the economy is this year compared to last year, the GDP figure has to be adjusted for inflation. If the economy grew 5% in nominal terms and inflation was 3%, then GDP grew 2% in real terms, that is, real goods and services, as opposed to mere price rises, increased 2% over the year.
When John Williams adjusts US GDP with the former or traditional measure of inflation, he finds that there has been no growth in real GDP for several years. In other words, during the period of “economic recovery” the economy has actually been declining.
American economic decline began with offshoring during the Clinton administration. Instead of addressing this threat, the Clinton administration launched the neoconservative program of American Empire with American and NATO naked aggression against Serbia, sending the Serbian leader off to be tried as a war criminal for resisting the dissolution of his country.
The Bush/Cheney regime elevated the pursuit of American Empire under cover of “the war on terror.” Based entirely on lies and falsified intelligence, Bush/Cheney launched wars against the Taliban, who were unifying Afghanistan, and against Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
In the 1980s Hussein was used by Washington to launch a war against the revolutionary government in Iran that had overthrown the American puppet government, headed by the Shah of Iran. Ever since Washington lost its puppet rule over the Iranians, Washington has refused diplomatic relations with Iran. In the place of diplomatic relations, Washington demonizes Iran in order to set the country up for another attack a la Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen. Syria is next.
Saddam Hussein’s service to Washington was overlooked when it became more important to eliminate support for Hamas and Hezbollah, two barriers to Israel’s expansion in the Middle East, than to maintain Washington’s gratitude to an Iraqi pawn.
Despite unequivocal reports from arms inspectors that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and most certainly had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11, top Bush/Cheney regime officials demonized Iraq as the greatest threat to America. The imagery of mushroom clouds from nuclear weapons was evoked, A war was launched entirely on false pretexts that destroyed a country and left over one million Iraqis dead and four million displaced. What Washington did to Iraq is what the Nazis were tried and executed for at the Nuremberg Trials.
Obama was elected in order to stop the illegal and senseless wars. Instead, Obama both continued the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and expanded the wars into Libya, Pakistan, and Yemen. Since the deregulation of the financial system under the Bush/Cheney regime and the “war on terror,” the entire economy of the US has been sacrificed for the benefit of the financial sector and the military/security complex.
Labor Day is an anachronism. It should be renamed Corporation Day or War Day to celebrate the success of Bush/Obama in eliminating labor unions as a countervailing power to corporate power and the elevation of War as the highest goal of the American state.
“Labor Day” should be renamed “Corporation Day” or “War Day”
It is Labor Day weekend, 2011, but labor has nothing to celebrate. The jobs that once gave American workers a stake in capitalism have left and gone away. Corporations in pursuit of near-term profits have moved labor’s jobs to China, India, Indonesia, Taiwan, South Korea and Eastern Europe.
Labor arbitrage, that is, the substitution of foreign labor that is paid less than its productivity for American labor, has enriched Wall Street, shareholders and corporate CEOs, but it has devastated American employment, household incomes, tax base, and the outlook for the US economy.
This Labor Day week-end’s job report, announced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Friday, September 2, says zero net new jobs were created in August, a number 250,000 less than the amount of monthly job creation necessary to make progress in reducing America’s high rate of unemployment.
The zero figure is actually an optimistic number. As John Williams (shadowstats.com) has made clear, problems with the BLS’s seasonal adjustments and “birth-death” model during the prolonged downturn that began in December 2007 result in the BLS over-estimating new jobs and underestimating lost jobs.
Seasonal adjustments and the “birth-death” model were designed with a growing economy in mind and result in miscounts during downturns. For example, the “birth-death” model estimates new jobs that are created from new start-up companies that are not yet reporting, and it estimates the job losses from companies that have gone out of business. In a growing economy, start-ups exceed jobs losses, but the situation reverses during downturns or during periods of sub-normal job growth. For the past forty-four months, the “birth-death” model has overestimated the number of new jobs created. When the annual revisions are made to the job reports, the excess jobs are taken out, but it is seldom headline news.
The reason that nearly four years of economic stimulus, consisting of large federal budget deficits and near zero interest rates, hasn’t revived the economy is that the jobs that Americans once had have been moved offshore. Stimulus cannot put Americans back to work in jobs that have been given to foreign countries.
Post-World War II Keynesian economists, such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich, think that if the federal government would add more stimulus by enlarging the already massive federal deficit, new jobs would somehow be created to take the place of those that have left. This is a delusion. Not only have the supply chains necessary to support US economic activity been disrupted and broken by offshoring, but also the same incentive–excess supplies of foreign labor that produces more value than it is paid–that sent jobs abroad is still operative.
In a word, the US economy has been de-industrializing, moving from a developed to an underdeveloped economy, for the past two decades. It has been the case for many years that when the US economy manages to eke out new jobs, they are in non-tradable domestic services, such as health care and social assistance, waitresses and bar tenders, retail clerks. Non-tradable employment consists of jobs that do not produce goods and services that could be exported to reduce the large US trade deficit.
The long-term deterioration in the US economy has been covered up by “reforming” the official measures of unemployment and inflation. The U3 measure of unemployment, the current 9.1% unemployment rate, only measures unemployment among those who are actively seeking a job. Those who have become discouraged by the inability to find a job and have ceased looking are not counted as being among the unemployed, and the U3 measure makes no adjustment for those who are forced into part-time jobs because there is no full-time employment.
The government knows that the U3 “headline” unemployment rate is seriously understated and provides a broader measure known as U6. This measure, which is seldom reported by the financial media, includes short-term discouraged workers (those who have not looked for jobs for six months or less) and an adjustment for those who wish full time employment but can only find part time work. Currently, this measure of unemployment stands at 16.2%.
In 1994 the Clinton “progressive” administration defined long-term discouraged workers out of existence. Consequently, no official unemployment rate includes long-term (more than six months) discouraged workers as unemployed. John Williams estimates this number and adds it to the U6 measure to produce a current rate of US unemployment of 22.7%, an unemployment rate 2.5 times higher than the official rate.
Similar understatement exists in the measure of inflation known as the Consumer Price Index. In order to reduce cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security checks and to hold down other inflation adjustments, the “progressive” Clinton administration accepted the Boskin Commission’s recommendation to introduce substitution into what had been a fixed, weighted, basket of goods used to measure the cost of a constant standard of living. In the new “reformed” measure, if the price of an item increases, say New York strip steak, the index assumes that consumers switch to a less expensive cut, such as round steak. Thus, the price increase doesn’t show up in the CPI.
Consumers, or a number of them, do tend to behave in this way. However, since the basket of goods comprising the CPI is no longer constant, but changes with price changes, the CPI has become a variable measure of the cost of living that reduces the inflation rate by measuring a lower standard of living.
John Williams estimates the CPI according to the previous official methodology that used a fixed basket of goods. He finds the rate of inflation to be much higher than is reported by the substitution-based methodology.http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts
The understatement of inflation serves to boost real Gross Domestic Product growth. In order to compare how much larger (or smaller) the economy is this year compared to last year, the GDP figure has to be adjusted for inflation. If the economy grew 5% in nominal terms and inflation was 3%, then GDP grew 2% in real terms, that is, real goods and services, as opposed to mere price rises, increased 2% over the year.
When John Williams adjusts US GDP with the former or traditional measure of inflation, he finds that there has been no growth in real GDP for several years. In other words, during the period of “economic recovery” the economy has actually been declining.
American economic decline began with offshoring during the Clinton administration. Instead of addressing this threat, the Clinton administration launched the neoconservative program of American Empire with American and NATO naked aggression against Serbia, sending the Serbian leader off to be tried as a war criminal for resisting the dissolution of his country.
The Bush/Cheney regime elevated the pursuit of American Empire under cover of “the war on terror.” Based entirely on lies and falsified intelligence, Bush/Cheney launched wars against the Taliban, who were unifying Afghanistan, and against Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
In the 1980s Hussein was used by Washington to launch a war against the revolutionary government in Iran that had overthrown the American puppet government, headed by the Shah of Iran. Ever since Washington lost its puppet rule over the Iranians, Washington has refused diplomatic relations with Iran. In the place of diplomatic relations, Washington demonizes Iran in order to set the country up for another attack a la Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen. Syria is next.
Saddam Hussein’s service to Washington was overlooked when it became more important to eliminate support for Hamas and Hezbollah, two barriers to Israel’s expansion in the Middle East, than to maintain Washington’s gratitude to an Iraqi pawn.
Despite unequivocal reports from arms inspectors that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and most certainly had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11, top Bush/Cheney regime officials demonized Iraq as the greatest threat to America. The imagery of mushroom clouds from nuclear weapons was evoked, A war was launched entirely on false pretexts that destroyed a country and left over one million Iraqis dead and four million displaced. What Washington did to Iraq is what the Nazis were tried and executed for at the Nuremberg Trials.
Obama was elected in order to stop the illegal and senseless wars. Instead, Obama both continued the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and expanded the wars into Libya, Pakistan, and Yemen. Since the deregulation of the financial system under the Bush/Cheney regime and the “war on terror,” the entire economy of the US has been sacrificed for the benefit of the financial sector and the military/security complex.
Labor Day is an anachronism. It should be renamed Corporation Day or War Day to celebrate the success of Bush/Obama in eliminating labor unions as a countervailing power to corporate power and the elevation of War as the highest goal of the American state.
source: Think Progress
What You Need To Know About The Michigan GOP’s ‘Right-To-Work’ Assault On Workers
On Thursday, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) backtracked on his commitment to avoid so-called “right-to-work” legislation and by the end of the day, both the Michigan House of Representatives and the Michigan state Senate had introduced and passed separate bills aimed at the state’s union workforce.
Michigan Republicans claim the state needs the measure to stay competitive with Indiana, where lawmakers passed “right-to-work” last year. In reality, though, such laws have negative effects on workers and little effect on economic growth. Here is what you need to know about the state GOP’s campaign:
What You Need To Know About The Michigan GOP’s ‘Right-To-Work’ Assault On Workers
On Thursday, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) backtracked on his commitment to avoid so-called “right-to-work” legislation and by the end of the day, both the Michigan House of Representatives and the Michigan state Senate had introduced and passed separate bills aimed at the state’s union workforce.
Michigan Republicans claim the state needs the measure to stay competitive with Indiana, where lawmakers passed “right-to-work” last year. In reality, though, such laws have negative effects on workers and little effect on economic growth. Here is what you need to know about the state GOP’s campaign:
THE LEGISLATION: Both the state House and state Senate passed legislation on Thursday that prohibits private sector unions from requiring members to pay dues. The Senate followed suit and passed a different but similar measure that extends the same prohibition for public sector unions, though firefighters and police officers are exempt. The state House included a budget appropriations provision that is intended to prevent the state’s voters from being able to legally challenge the law through a ballot referendum. Due to state law, both houses are prevented from voting on legislation passed by the other for five days, so neither will be able to fully pass the legislation until Tuesday at the earliest.
THE PROCESS: Union leaders and Democrats claim that Republicans are pushing the legislation through in the lame-duck session to hide the intent of the measures from citizens, and because the legislation would face more trouble after the new House convenes in January. Michigan Republicans hold a 63-47 advantage in the state House, but Democrats narrowed the GOP majority to just eight seats in November. Six Republicans opposed the House measure; five of them won re-election in 2012 (the sixth retired). And Michigan Republicans have good reason to pursue the laws without public debate. Though the state’s voters are evenly split on whether it should become a right-to-work state, 78 percent of voters said the legislature “should focus on issues like creating jobs and improving education, and not changing state laws or rules that would impact unions or make further changes in collective bargaining.”
THE CONSEQUENCES: While Snyder and Republicans pitched “right-to-work” as a pro-worker move aimed at improving the economy, studies show such legislation can cost workers money. The Economic Policy Institute found that right-to-work laws cost all workers, union and otherwise, $1,500 a year in wages and that they make it harder for workers to obtain pensions and health coverage. “If benefits coverage in non-right-to-work states were lowered to the levels of states with these laws, 2 million fewer workers would receive health insurance and 3.8 million fewer workers would receive pensions nationwide,” David Madland and Karla Walter from the Center for American Progress wrote earlier this year. The decreases in union membership that result from right-to-work laws have a significant impact on the middle class and research “shows that there is no relationship between right-to-work laws and state unemployment rates, state per capita income, or state job growth,” EPI wrote in a recent report about Michigan. “Right-to-work” laws also decrease worker safety and can hurt small businesses.
Union leaders are, of course, aghast at Snyder and the GOP’s right-to-work push. “In a state that gave birth to the modern U.S. labor movement, it is unconscionable that Michigan legislators would seek to drive down living standards for Michigan workers and families with a law that will do nothing to improve either the state’s economic climate or the quality of life for Michigan residents,” RoseAnn DeMoro, the executive director of National Nurses United, said in a statement.THE PROCESS: Union leaders and Democrats claim that Republicans are pushing the legislation through in the lame-duck session to hide the intent of the measures from citizens, and because the legislation would face more trouble after the new House convenes in January. Michigan Republicans hold a 63-47 advantage in the state House, but Democrats narrowed the GOP majority to just eight seats in November. Six Republicans opposed the House measure; five of them won re-election in 2012 (the sixth retired). And Michigan Republicans have good reason to pursue the laws without public debate. Though the state’s voters are evenly split on whether it should become a right-to-work state, 78 percent of voters said the legislature “should focus on issues like creating jobs and improving education, and not changing state laws or rules that would impact unions or make further changes in collective bargaining.”
THE CONSEQUENCES: While Snyder and Republicans pitched “right-to-work” as a pro-worker move aimed at improving the economy, studies show such legislation can cost workers money. The Economic Policy Institute found that right-to-work laws cost all workers, union and otherwise, $1,500 a year in wages and that they make it harder for workers to obtain pensions and health coverage. “If benefits coverage in non-right-to-work states were lowered to the levels of states with these laws, 2 million fewer workers would receive health insurance and 3.8 million fewer workers would receive pensions nationwide,” David Madland and Karla Walter from the Center for American Progress wrote earlier this year. The decreases in union membership that result from right-to-work laws have a significant impact on the middle class and research “shows that there is no relationship between right-to-work laws and state unemployment rates, state per capita income, or state job growth,” EPI wrote in a recent report about Michigan. “Right-to-work” laws also decrease worker safety and can hurt small businesses.
The Unions add no value to companies, create high unemployment for States, encourage companies to offshore or go to business friendly states, and become a destructive force by striking that can result in bankruptcy.
1. Super large unions could self-insure their employees to reduce health insurance costs for companies. Why let your employer pay $17,000 a year, when you can offer a plan that is $10,000 by cutting the junk. Many Union cover multiple employers. Great, the UAW health insurance plan helped save GM $7,000 per employee, Unions are great!!!!
2. Provide capital to your employers through low interest rate loans and stock purchases. Instead of using stock purchases for share appreciation, union members can combine and leverage for higher pay at a company. Create a counter force to Wall Street that rewards offshoring, layoffs, and wage stagnation. You can avoid or reduce layoffs, keep a company out of bankruptcy, and prevent offshoring.
Quit using union dues for strike funds, buying politicians, and investments in other companies!!!!If an employer does not want to play ball, you can suspend stock purchase and loans, then sell stock, and strike as the last option. Plus this fund can pull money in from sources such as pension funds from teaches or state employees.
It is time for Unions to join the 21st century. By being more business friendly and adding value, you can actually attract companies to a state with their presence. States like Michigan have to use federal tax dollars to bribe companies to relocate.
Site your facts
This is obvious. since when does an employer willingly pay its employees a "decent" wage. This is the basis for collective bargaining. Companies don't go into bankruptcy because they pay their workers too much, they go into bankruptcy because of bad business decisions and practices.
Here is a better idea. Why not have national, federal. single payer health insurance. That way health insurance is not dependent on the employer. With today's job model, the volatility of employment and the proliferation of part time and contract work, this would solve many problems.
Reinstate the pre-Reagan era tax rates and reascended the destructive WTO treaties. This would encourage corporations to re-invest in their businesses and discourage off shoring of American jobs, rather than paying their executives 127 times the average wage of their workers.
Ridiculous. Unions are the remaining countervailing force against corporate lobbyists. This is even more so since the Citizens United Supreme Court decision. Strikes are a last option. Strikes are a hardship on employees and employers. Strike are one of the few methods available to employees to improve their workplace.
Unions are an answer to 21st century employer, employee relationships. With stories about businesses around the globe having 19th century work places and workers dying in factory fires the way they did in the US 100 years ago and workers being paid pennies per day, unions are one of the only ways to address safety and employer environments. We need more protection for workers.
The wealth gap around the world is widening. Worker productivity has improve exponentially over the last 30 years and corporate profits are at record levels, yet workers are not sharing equitably in the profits of their labor. Wages have fallen since the 1980s.
We need international wage and labor laws. Companies can skirt national wage and labor rules by off shoring labor. This can be counteracted by instituting and enforcing common labor standards world wide. Financial and patent laws are standardized and enforced worldwide, why not labor laws and employee rights?
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/VRr60nmDyu4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Another example that unions are not the problem.
source: Huffington Post
Hostess Workers' Pension Money Diverted For Other Uses: Report
Hostess Brands acknowledged for the first time in a news report Monday that the company diverted workers' pension money for other company uses.
The bankrupt baker told The Wall Street Journal that money taken out of workers' paychecks, intended for their retirement funds, was used for company operations instead. Hostess, which was under different management at the time the diversions began in August 2011, said it does not know how much money it took.
"It's not a good situation to have," Hostess CEO Gregory Rayburn told the WSJ.
"Whatever the circumstances were, whatever those decisions were, I wasn't there," Rayburn added. As the founder and owner of Kobi Partners, a restructuring advisory firm, Rayburn was appointed acting CEO in March 2012.
Hostess Brands, which filed for bankruptcy for a second time in January, started liquidating its operations in November after the bakers' union refused to take another pay cut and went on strike. The liquidation will leave about 18,000 workers without jobs.
In November, a judge approved Hostess' plan to pay $1.8 million in bonuses to 19 executives, according to CNBC. Rayburn declined to take a bonus but also avoided a company-wide pay cut that he imposed, Hostess told HuffPost.
Twinkies are unlikely to go extinct, since Hostess is in talks with 110 buyers about its brands. But the snack cake genre may need a revamp, as Americans have become increasingly health- and quality-conscious.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that a judge approved $1.8 billion in bonuses for Hostess executives. The judge approved only $1.8 million in bonuses.
source: Huffington Post
Hostess Workers' Pension Money Diverted For Other Uses: Report
Hostess Brands acknowledged for the first time in a news report Monday that the company diverted workers' pension money for other company uses.
The bankrupt baker told The Wall Street Journal that money taken out of workers' paychecks, intended for their retirement funds, was used for company operations instead. Hostess, which was under different management at the time the diversions began in August 2011, said it does not know how much money it took.
"It's not a good situation to have," Hostess CEO Gregory Rayburn told the WSJ.
"Whatever the circumstances were, whatever those decisions were, I wasn't there," Rayburn added. As the founder and owner of Kobi Partners, a restructuring advisory firm, Rayburn was appointed acting CEO in March 2012.
Hostess Brands, which filed for bankruptcy for a second time in January, started liquidating its operations in November after the bakers' union refused to take another pay cut and went on strike. The liquidation will leave about 18,000 workers without jobs.
In November, a judge approved Hostess' plan to pay $1.8 million in bonuses to 19 executives, according to CNBC. Rayburn declined to take a bonus but also avoided a company-wide pay cut that he imposed, Hostess told HuffPost.
Twinkies are unlikely to go extinct, since Hostess is in talks with 110 buyers about its brands. But the snack cake genre may need a revamp, as Americans have become increasingly health- and quality-conscious.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that a judge approved $1.8 billion in bonuses for Hostess executives. The judge approved only $1.8 million in bonuses.
Hoffa Predicts Civil War In Michigan
(CNN) - Jimmy Hoffa, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, said Tuesday he expects Michigan unions and lawmakers to break out into "civil war" after the state legislature passed right-to-work bills that would weaken unions' power.
"This is just the first round of a battle that's going to divide this state. We're going to have a civil war," Hoffa said on CNN's "Newsroom."
(CNN) - Jimmy Hoffa, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, said Tuesday he expects Michigan unions and lawmakers to break out into "civil war" after the state legislature passed right-to-work bills that would weaken unions' power.
"This is just the first round of a battle that's going to divide this state. We're going to have a civil war," Hoffa said on CNN's "Newsroom."
Unions suffer steep decline in membership
Unions suffer steep decline in membership
By SAM HANANEL | Associated Press – Wed, Jan 23, 2013
WASHINGTON (AP) — The nation's labor unions suffered sharp declines in membership last year, led by losses among public sector workers in cash-strapped states, cities, counties and towns.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the unionization rate fell from 11.8 percent to 11.3 percent of all workers, the lowest level since the 1930s.
Total union membership fell by about 400,000 workers to 14.4 million. Teachers unions were among the hardest hit, with the ranks of public school teachers and educators falling sharply.
Unions also saw losses in the private sector, even as the economy expanded modestly. The private sector unionization rate fell from 6.9 percent to 6.6 percent.
Unions have steadily lost members since their peak in the 1950s, when about one of every three workers was in a union.
http://news.yahoo.com/unions-suffer-steep-decline-membership-151525987.html
Unions suffer steep decline in membership
By SAM HANANEL | Associated Press – Wed, Jan 23, 2013
WASHINGTON (AP) — The nation's labor unions suffered sharp declines in membership last year, led by losses among public sector workers in cash-strapped states, cities, counties and towns.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the unionization rate fell from 11.8 percent to 11.3 percent of all workers, the lowest level since the 1930s.
Total union membership fell by about 400,000 workers to 14.4 million. Teachers unions were among the hardest hit, with the ranks of public school teachers and educators falling sharply.
Unions also saw losses in the private sector, even as the economy expanded modestly. The private sector unionization rate fell from 6.9 percent to 6.6 percent.
Unions have steadily lost members since their peak in the 1950s, when about one of every three workers was in a union.
http://news.yahoo.com/unions-suffer-steep-decline-membership-151525987.html
source: Think Progress
Report: As Union Membership Rates Decrease, Middle Class Incomes Shrink
Union membership is at record lows and is likely to drop even further tomorrow when the Bureau of Labor Statistics announces new figures for 2010. Critics claim that unions are not important to the modern economy — with only 12 percent of workers currently unionized — but the truth is that if you care about the middle class, you need to care about unions.
The middle class is markedly stronger when workers join together in unions. As the chart below demonstrates, the sharp decline over the past 40 years in the percentage of workers organized in unions has been associated with an equally sharp drop in the share of the nation’s income going to the middle class — those in the second, third and forth income quintiles*:
<CENTER>
</CENTER>
The power of unions to create prosperity for working families is well recognized: Organized labor is one of the few voices for the economic interests of the middle class in our government. Unions were key to creating and protecting the social safety net (including Social Security and Medicare) and winning major legislative victories for working families such as the Equal Pay Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Family and Medical Leave Act and — most recently — the Affordable Care Act.
And unions ensure that workers are paid fair wages. Unionized workers today make significantly more on than their non-union counterparts — about $2.50 more per hour than an otherwise comparable worker in the typical state according to a recent study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
When unions were stronger in the middle part of the last century, American workers wages rose as they became increasingly more productive. But today, as union strength has decreased, this link has broken down: even though American workers grow increasingly more productive, their wages have stagnated. At the same time, more and more income has become concentrated at the very top of the income scale.
If DOL announces tomorrow that unionization rates have again fallen, it’s not just bleak news for the ranks of the unionized, it’s also bad news for the rest of the middle class.
*Sources: Union membership rate is from Barry T. Hirsch, David A. Macpherson, and Wayne G. Vroman, “Estimates of Union Density by State,” Middle class share of aggregate national income includes the second, third and forth income quintiles and is from the United States Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (Shares of Aggregate Household Income by Quintile).
Report: As Union Membership Rates Decrease, Middle Class Incomes Shrink
Union membership is at record lows and is likely to drop even further tomorrow when the Bureau of Labor Statistics announces new figures for 2010. Critics claim that unions are not important to the modern economy — with only 12 percent of workers currently unionized — but the truth is that if you care about the middle class, you need to care about unions.
The middle class is markedly stronger when workers join together in unions. As the chart below demonstrates, the sharp decline over the past 40 years in the percentage of workers organized in unions has been associated with an equally sharp drop in the share of the nation’s income going to the middle class — those in the second, third and forth income quintiles*:
<CENTER>
The power of unions to create prosperity for working families is well recognized: Organized labor is one of the few voices for the economic interests of the middle class in our government. Unions were key to creating and protecting the social safety net (including Social Security and Medicare) and winning major legislative victories for working families such as the Equal Pay Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Family and Medical Leave Act and — most recently — the Affordable Care Act.
And unions ensure that workers are paid fair wages. Unionized workers today make significantly more on than their non-union counterparts — about $2.50 more per hour than an otherwise comparable worker in the typical state according to a recent study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
When unions were stronger in the middle part of the last century, American workers wages rose as they became increasingly more productive. But today, as union strength has decreased, this link has broken down: even though American workers grow increasingly more productive, their wages have stagnated. At the same time, more and more income has become concentrated at the very top of the income scale.
If DOL announces tomorrow that unionization rates have again fallen, it’s not just bleak news for the ranks of the unionized, it’s also bad news for the rest of the middle class.
*Sources: Union membership rate is from Barry T. Hirsch, David A. Macpherson, and Wayne G. Vroman, “Estimates of Union Density by State,” Middle class share of aggregate national income includes the second, third and forth income quintiles and is from the United States Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (Shares of Aggregate Household Income by Quintile).
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/pfh_WfoK7PQ" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
GOP seeks alternative to overtime pay
GOP seeks alternative to overtime pay
By SAM HANANEL | Associated Press
3 hrs ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — It seems like a simple proposition: give employees who work more than 40 hours a week the option of taking paid time off instead of overtime pay.
The choice already exists in the public sector. Federal and state workers can save earned time off and use it weeks or even months later to attend a parent-teacher conference, care for an elderly parent or deal with home repairs.
Republicans in Congress are pushing legislation that would extend that option to the private sector. They say that would bring more flexibility to the workplace and help workers better balance family and career.
The push is part of a broader Republican agenda undertaken by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., to expand the party's political appeal to working families. The House is expected to vote on the measure this week, but the Democratic-controlled Senate isn't likely to take it up.
"For some people, time is more valuable than the cash that would be accrued in overtime," said Rep. Martha Roby, R-Ala., the bill's chief sponsor. "Why should public-sector employees be given a benefit and the private sector be left out?"
But the idea Republicans promote as "pro-worker" is vigorously opposed by worker advocacy groups, labor unions and most Democrats. These opponents claim it's really a backdoor way for businesses to skimp on overtime pay.
Judith Lichtman, senior adviser to the National Partnership for Women and Families, contends the measure would open the door for employers to pressure workers into taking compensatory time off instead of overtime pay.
The program was created in the public sector in 1985 to save federal, state and local governments money, not to give workers greater flexibility, Lichtman said. Many workers in federal and state government are unionized or have civil service protections that give them more leverage in dealing with supervisors, she added. Those safeguards don't always exist in the private sector, where only about 6.6 percent of employees are union members.
Phil Jones, 29, an emergency medical technician in Santa Clara, Calif., said he's wary of how the measure would be enforced.
"Any time there's a law that will keep extra money in an employer's bank account, they will try to push employees to make that choice," said Jones, who regularly earns overtime pay. "I know how we get taken advantage of and I think this bill will just let employers take even more advantage of us."
But at a hearing on the bill last month, Karen DeLoach, a bookkeeper at a Montgomery, Ala., accounting firm, said she liked the idea of swapping overtime pay for comp time so she could travel with her church on its annual mission trip to Nicaragua.
"I would greatly appreciate the option at work to choose between being compensated in dollars or days," she said.
The GOP plan is an effort to change the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which requires covered employees to receive time-and-a-half pay for every hour over 40 within a work week. The proposal would allow workers to bank up to 160 hours, or four weeks, of comp time per year that could be used to take time off for any reason.
The bill would let an employee decide to cash out comp time at any time, and forbids employers from coercing workers to take comp time instead of cash.
Republicans and business groups have tried to pass the plan in some form since the 1990s.
Democrats say the bill provides no guarantee that workers would be able to take the time off when they want. The bill gives employers discretion over whether to grant a specific request to use comp time. Opponents also complain that banking leave time essentially gives employers an interest-free loan from workers.
http://news.yahoo.com/gop-seeks-alternative-overtime-pay-074228556.html
GOP seeks alternative to overtime pay
By SAM HANANEL | Associated Press
3 hrs ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — It seems like a simple proposition: give employees who work more than 40 hours a week the option of taking paid time off instead of overtime pay.
The choice already exists in the public sector. Federal and state workers can save earned time off and use it weeks or even months later to attend a parent-teacher conference, care for an elderly parent or deal with home repairs.
Republicans in Congress are pushing legislation that would extend that option to the private sector. They say that would bring more flexibility to the workplace and help workers better balance family and career.
The push is part of a broader Republican agenda undertaken by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., to expand the party's political appeal to working families. The House is expected to vote on the measure this week, but the Democratic-controlled Senate isn't likely to take it up.
"For some people, time is more valuable than the cash that would be accrued in overtime," said Rep. Martha Roby, R-Ala., the bill's chief sponsor. "Why should public-sector employees be given a benefit and the private sector be left out?"
But the idea Republicans promote as "pro-worker" is vigorously opposed by worker advocacy groups, labor unions and most Democrats. These opponents claim it's really a backdoor way for businesses to skimp on overtime pay.
Judith Lichtman, senior adviser to the National Partnership for Women and Families, contends the measure would open the door for employers to pressure workers into taking compensatory time off instead of overtime pay.
The program was created in the public sector in 1985 to save federal, state and local governments money, not to give workers greater flexibility, Lichtman said. Many workers in federal and state government are unionized or have civil service protections that give them more leverage in dealing with supervisors, she added. Those safeguards don't always exist in the private sector, where only about 6.6 percent of employees are union members.
Phil Jones, 29, an emergency medical technician in Santa Clara, Calif., said he's wary of how the measure would be enforced.
"Any time there's a law that will keep extra money in an employer's bank account, they will try to push employees to make that choice," said Jones, who regularly earns overtime pay. "I know how we get taken advantage of and I think this bill will just let employers take even more advantage of us."
But at a hearing on the bill last month, Karen DeLoach, a bookkeeper at a Montgomery, Ala., accounting firm, said she liked the idea of swapping overtime pay for comp time so she could travel with her church on its annual mission trip to Nicaragua.
"I would greatly appreciate the option at work to choose between being compensated in dollars or days," she said.
The GOP plan is an effort to change the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which requires covered employees to receive time-and-a-half pay for every hour over 40 within a work week. The proposal would allow workers to bank up to 160 hours, or four weeks, of comp time per year that could be used to take time off for any reason.
The bill would let an employee decide to cash out comp time at any time, and forbids employers from coercing workers to take comp time instead of cash.
Republicans and business groups have tried to pass the plan in some form since the 1990s.
Democrats say the bill provides no guarantee that workers would be able to take the time off when they want. The bill gives employers discretion over whether to grant a specific request to use comp time. Opponents also complain that banking leave time essentially gives employers an interest-free loan from workers.
http://news.yahoo.com/gop-seeks-alternative-overtime-pay-074228556.html
What Do U.S. College Graduates Lack? Professionalism
What Do U.S. College Graduates Lack? Professionalism
By Mark Bauerlein
May 8, 2013 5:09 PM CT
I gave an exam last week, and one student showed up 25 minutes late. When the hour ended and I collected the papers, he looked up from his seat, cast a pitiable glance and mumbled, “Please, I got here late -- may I have another 20 minutes?”
I shook my head and said, “Can’t do that.” His request echoed in my head all the way back to my office. Where in the world did he get the idea that an exam doesn’t begin and end at a set time?
Employers call it an “employability skill” -- work ethic, timeliness, attendance and so on -- and they deal with it every day. Whenever the National Association of Manufacturers administers its “Skills Gap” surveys to members, failings in this area are as likely to be cited as complaints about inadequate technical and verbal skills.
In 2001 and 2005, the association’s members rated employability skills as a crushing deficiency in their workforce, and more respondents urged schools to instill better behavior than did those who demanded more training in reading and math.
Even after the 2008 financial crisis, poor conduct remains a top complaint. In the 2011 survey, 40 percent of employers cited “inadequate basic employability skills” as a reason for why they can’t hire and keep workers.
Employability skills aren’t only a blue-collar failing, as shown by the “Professionalism in the Workplace” survey from York College of Pennsylvania released earlier this year. The college’s project asked 401 human-resource people about the professionalism of recent college graduates.
Casual Attitudes
Forty-nine percent of them stated that less than half of new employees “exhibit professionalism in their first year.” More than half (53 percent) have noticed “a sense of entitlement” rising among younger workers; almost 45 percent have seen a “worsening of the work ethic,” including “too casual of an attitude toward work” and “not understanding what hard work is.”
Younger workers believe they can multitask and remain productive, the human-resources people told the York researchers. Thirty-eight percent of respondents blamed multitasking for the lack of “focus” among younger workers. The authors of the study explained that the younger generation “believes that it is possible to multi-task effectively” and that using social media, for example, is an efficient way to communicate. In interviews, the applicants check their phones for texts and calls, dress inappropriately and overrate their talents.
“The sad fact is some of these persons probably do not understand what is wrong with this,” the authors note.
Older workers have always complained about younger workers, of course, but there’s a difference: This time they attribute the youthful flaws not to ignorance or waywardness, but to a “sense of entitlement.”
We might forgive 18-year-olds fresh out of high school for lacking employability skills (the manufacturing sector hires many workers lacking undergraduate degrees). But when he or she reaches 23 and has four years of college, employers expect a white-collar worker to recognize basic norms of dress and deportment.
What happened in college, then? The survey by York College’s Center for Professional Excellence assigns colleges part of the blame, observing that letting students miss deadlines without penalty and assigning good grades for middling work only make them form the wrong expectations.
Yet, it turns out, professors don’t coddle students and overlook youthful flaws. Another survey by York College finds that professors think the same thing as employers do. It’s the 2012 “Professionalism on Campus” survey, a questionnaire about juniors and seniors answered by 415 college and university faculty members.
Entitlement Culture
Professors generally agreed that professionalism includes attentiveness, punctuality and a work ethic, and 37 percent think it has declined over the past five years, while only 12 percent see an improvement.
Even more than employers, fully 64 percent of professors observe an increase in a sense of entitlement in recent years, while only 5 percent say it has decreased. The students text-message during class, send e-mails to teachers with grammar and spelling errors, and act “unfocused.” (For the “unfocused” part, the researchers said they started hearing comments a few years ago from employers about workers lacking “focus,” so they included a direct item in the questionnaire on it.) Faculty members identify parents as the main cause, though American culture in general and grade inflation in high school also receive blame.
Let’s agree that everyone is at fault, more or less. The burden falls heaviest on the workplace. High-school teachers have few direct incentives to toughen up their classrooms. The steady drag of uninterested students and school bureaucracy beats them down to the point where using higher grades and lax discipline are the easiest ways to make it through the week.
College professors, too, have no direct incentive to raise the bar on behavior, given the influence of student ratings of their performance and pressure from administrators and parents. Most of all, poor behavior by students doesn’t immediately threaten the livelihood of teachers.
A bad worker, however, jeopardizes a whole unit’s productivity, and a manager can’t simply pass a low performer to the next level. Teachers who allow delinquent students to slide merely compromise their own integrity. Dereliction in the workplace puts profits at risk.
This, then, is the real transition into adulthood in the U.S. today -- not graduating from high school, leaving home or learning how to succeed in college, but performing full-time work for bosses who can’t compromise, and all too often must say, “Your work isn’t up to par, you’re not as great as you think, and if you don’t improve, you’re fired.”
As employers and government officials put more pressure on colleges to produce employable graduates, this message should reach students before they collect their diploma.
(Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University and the author of “The Dumbest Generation.” The opinions expressed are his own.)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-08/what-do-u-s-college-graduates-lack-professionalism.html
What Do U.S. College Graduates Lack? Professionalism
By Mark Bauerlein
May 8, 2013 5:09 PM CT
I gave an exam last week, and one student showed up 25 minutes late. When the hour ended and I collected the papers, he looked up from his seat, cast a pitiable glance and mumbled, “Please, I got here late -- may I have another 20 minutes?”
I shook my head and said, “Can’t do that.” His request echoed in my head all the way back to my office. Where in the world did he get the idea that an exam doesn’t begin and end at a set time?
Employers call it an “employability skill” -- work ethic, timeliness, attendance and so on -- and they deal with it every day. Whenever the National Association of Manufacturers administers its “Skills Gap” surveys to members, failings in this area are as likely to be cited as complaints about inadequate technical and verbal skills.
In 2001 and 2005, the association’s members rated employability skills as a crushing deficiency in their workforce, and more respondents urged schools to instill better behavior than did those who demanded more training in reading and math.
Even after the 2008 financial crisis, poor conduct remains a top complaint. In the 2011 survey, 40 percent of employers cited “inadequate basic employability skills” as a reason for why they can’t hire and keep workers.
Employability skills aren’t only a blue-collar failing, as shown by the “Professionalism in the Workplace” survey from York College of Pennsylvania released earlier this year. The college’s project asked 401 human-resource people about the professionalism of recent college graduates.
Casual Attitudes
Forty-nine percent of them stated that less than half of new employees “exhibit professionalism in their first year.” More than half (53 percent) have noticed “a sense of entitlement” rising among younger workers; almost 45 percent have seen a “worsening of the work ethic,” including “too casual of an attitude toward work” and “not understanding what hard work is.”
Younger workers believe they can multitask and remain productive, the human-resources people told the York researchers. Thirty-eight percent of respondents blamed multitasking for the lack of “focus” among younger workers. The authors of the study explained that the younger generation “believes that it is possible to multi-task effectively” and that using social media, for example, is an efficient way to communicate. In interviews, the applicants check their phones for texts and calls, dress inappropriately and overrate their talents.
“The sad fact is some of these persons probably do not understand what is wrong with this,” the authors note.
Older workers have always complained about younger workers, of course, but there’s a difference: This time they attribute the youthful flaws not to ignorance or waywardness, but to a “sense of entitlement.”
We might forgive 18-year-olds fresh out of high school for lacking employability skills (the manufacturing sector hires many workers lacking undergraduate degrees). But when he or she reaches 23 and has four years of college, employers expect a white-collar worker to recognize basic norms of dress and deportment.
What happened in college, then? The survey by York College’s Center for Professional Excellence assigns colleges part of the blame, observing that letting students miss deadlines without penalty and assigning good grades for middling work only make them form the wrong expectations.
Yet, it turns out, professors don’t coddle students and overlook youthful flaws. Another survey by York College finds that professors think the same thing as employers do. It’s the 2012 “Professionalism on Campus” survey, a questionnaire about juniors and seniors answered by 415 college and university faculty members.
Entitlement Culture
Professors generally agreed that professionalism includes attentiveness, punctuality and a work ethic, and 37 percent think it has declined over the past five years, while only 12 percent see an improvement.
Even more than employers, fully 64 percent of professors observe an increase in a sense of entitlement in recent years, while only 5 percent say it has decreased. The students text-message during class, send e-mails to teachers with grammar and spelling errors, and act “unfocused.” (For the “unfocused” part, the researchers said they started hearing comments a few years ago from employers about workers lacking “focus,” so they included a direct item in the questionnaire on it.) Faculty members identify parents as the main cause, though American culture in general and grade inflation in high school also receive blame.
Let’s agree that everyone is at fault, more or less. The burden falls heaviest on the workplace. High-school teachers have few direct incentives to toughen up their classrooms. The steady drag of uninterested students and school bureaucracy beats them down to the point where using higher grades and lax discipline are the easiest ways to make it through the week.
College professors, too, have no direct incentive to raise the bar on behavior, given the influence of student ratings of their performance and pressure from administrators and parents. Most of all, poor behavior by students doesn’t immediately threaten the livelihood of teachers.
A bad worker, however, jeopardizes a whole unit’s productivity, and a manager can’t simply pass a low performer to the next level. Teachers who allow delinquent students to slide merely compromise their own integrity. Dereliction in the workplace puts profits at risk.
This, then, is the real transition into adulthood in the U.S. today -- not graduating from high school, leaving home or learning how to succeed in college, but performing full-time work for bosses who can’t compromise, and all too often must say, “Your work isn’t up to par, you’re not as great as you think, and if you don’t improve, you’re fired.”
As employers and government officials put more pressure on colleges to produce employable graduates, this message should reach students before they collect their diploma.
(Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University and the author of “The Dumbest Generation.” The opinions expressed are his own.)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-08/what-do-u-s-college-graduates-lack-professionalism.html
Re: What Do U.S. College Graduates Lack? Professionalism
There were stories about a month ago about how a recent graduate brought his cat, in a cage, to an interview, and how text and taking calls during the interview is apparently rampant.
And 400 greedy people wouldn't hurt anyone if your government would let them lose money when they were being stupid. Does $80 billion a month propping up stock and bond prices sound familiar?
Because that's a thing.
It's actually going on right now.
You know because banks have incredibly effective political connections.
Just saying.
Since you specifcally quoted the article twice so far, you should know that the article isn't saying laziness is the problem. It's a generational disconnect about what is considered appropriate in a professional setting.
Greedy
There were stories about a month ago about how a recent graduate brought his cat, in a cage, to an interview, and how text and taking calls during the interview is apparently rampant.
And 400 greedy people wouldn't hurt anyone if your government would let them lose money when they were being stupid. Does $80 billion a month propping up stock and bond prices sound familiar?
Because that's a thing.
It's actually going on right now.
You know because banks have incredibly effective political connections.
Just saying.
10-year strike at Congress Plaza Hotel is over
This has been a running joke in Chicago for a long time.
10-year strike at Congress Plaza Hotel is over
By Samantha Bomkamp
Tribune staff report
12:17 p.m. CDT, May 30, 2013
A 10-year strike at the Congress Plaza hotel in downtown Chicago -- believed to be the longest hotel strike in the world --has ended.
An attorney for the hotel said Unite Here Local 1, the union representing cleaning and maintenance workers, has offered an unconditional return to work as of midnight Wednesday. The union confirmed Thursday morning that it is ending the strike.
"The decision to end the Congress strike was a hard one, but it is the right time for the union and the strikers to move on," Unite Here Local 1 President Henry Tamarin said in a statement. "The boycott has effectively and dramatically reduced the hotel’s business. ... There is no more to do there."
The next step is still in question. Many of the 130 workers that originally went on strike have found new jobs or crossed the picket line and returned to work at Congress Plaza. If any strikers choose to come back to Congress as part of the "unconditional" return, terms call for them to be paid the same as they did more than a decade ago.
Tamarin said when the strike started, the standard wage for room attendants was $8.83 per hour -- a wage contract workers still make. The city wide standard for room attendants is now $16.40 an hour, he said.
Congress Plaza Hotel attorney Peter Andjelkovich called the move a surprise. He said the union and the hotel haven't sat down at the negotiation table in a year.
Andjelkovich said there are still many legal and logistical issues related to the employees’ return that still need to be worked out. In a press conference at the hotel Thursday morning, Andjelkovich said the hotel and union officials are planning to meet to facilitate the next step.
He said the company currently employs a staff of between 300 and 500, with wide variances between the high and low seasons. It’s filled in the positions vacated by striking workers mostly with sub-contracted employees, but there have also been between 30 and 40 picketers that have returned to work, he said.
The strike began on June 3 of 2003, when 130 Congress Hotel workers walked out in response to the hotel’s planned wage cuts, health care contribution freezes and the right to contract out some jobs.
The union says that it has found jobs for about 60 of those original workers, leaving only a few dozen remaining that could potentially return under Thursday’s deal.
The strikers have picketed regularly and held large rallies over the years, though only about half of the original group remained as active strikers by the protest's third anniversary. Workers were paid $200 a week to strike, forcing most to take on second jobs.
Congress Plaza was constructed in 1893 for the World's Columbian Exhibition and housed such presidents as Grover Cleveland, Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt. But the hotel fell on hard times and filed for bankruptcy protection in 1995, appraised at the time at just $20 million.
The hotel is led by the Nasser family, a wealthy group that holds investments in textiles and other global businesses.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/busin...s-plaza-hotel-strike-20130530,0,2075347.story
This has been a running joke in Chicago for a long time.
10-year strike at Congress Plaza Hotel is over
By Samantha Bomkamp
Tribune staff report
12:17 p.m. CDT, May 30, 2013
A 10-year strike at the Congress Plaza hotel in downtown Chicago -- believed to be the longest hotel strike in the world --has ended.
An attorney for the hotel said Unite Here Local 1, the union representing cleaning and maintenance workers, has offered an unconditional return to work as of midnight Wednesday. The union confirmed Thursday morning that it is ending the strike.
"The decision to end the Congress strike was a hard one, but it is the right time for the union and the strikers to move on," Unite Here Local 1 President Henry Tamarin said in a statement. "The boycott has effectively and dramatically reduced the hotel’s business. ... There is no more to do there."
The next step is still in question. Many of the 130 workers that originally went on strike have found new jobs or crossed the picket line and returned to work at Congress Plaza. If any strikers choose to come back to Congress as part of the "unconditional" return, terms call for them to be paid the same as they did more than a decade ago.
Tamarin said when the strike started, the standard wage for room attendants was $8.83 per hour -- a wage contract workers still make. The city wide standard for room attendants is now $16.40 an hour, he said.
Congress Plaza Hotel attorney Peter Andjelkovich called the move a surprise. He said the union and the hotel haven't sat down at the negotiation table in a year.
Andjelkovich said there are still many legal and logistical issues related to the employees’ return that still need to be worked out. In a press conference at the hotel Thursday morning, Andjelkovich said the hotel and union officials are planning to meet to facilitate the next step.
He said the company currently employs a staff of between 300 and 500, with wide variances between the high and low seasons. It’s filled in the positions vacated by striking workers mostly with sub-contracted employees, but there have also been between 30 and 40 picketers that have returned to work, he said.
The strike began on June 3 of 2003, when 130 Congress Hotel workers walked out in response to the hotel’s planned wage cuts, health care contribution freezes and the right to contract out some jobs.
The union says that it has found jobs for about 60 of those original workers, leaving only a few dozen remaining that could potentially return under Thursday’s deal.
The strikers have picketed regularly and held large rallies over the years, though only about half of the original group remained as active strikers by the protest's third anniversary. Workers were paid $200 a week to strike, forcing most to take on second jobs.
Congress Plaza was constructed in 1893 for the World's Columbian Exhibition and housed such presidents as Grover Cleveland, Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt. But the hotel fell on hard times and filed for bankruptcy protection in 1995, appraised at the time at just $20 million.
The hotel is led by the Nasser family, a wealthy group that holds investments in textiles and other global businesses.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/busin...s-plaza-hotel-strike-20130530,0,2075347.story
Temporary jobs becoming a permanent fixture in US
Temporary jobs becoming a permanent fixture in US
Temporary jobs becoming a permanent fixture in US as more employers seek 'just-in-time' labor
By Christopher s. Rugaber, AP Economics Writer | Associated Press
3 hrs ago
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Hiring is exploding in the one corner of the U.S. economy where few want to be hired: Temporary work.
From Wal-Mart to General Motors to PepsiCo, companies are increasingly turning to temps and to a much larger universe of freelancers, contract workers and consultants. Combined, these workers number nearly 17 million people who have only tenuous ties to the companies that pay them — about 12 percent of everyone with a job.
Hiring is always healthy for an economy. Yet the rise in temp and contract work shows that many employers aren't willing to hire for the long run.
The number of temps has jumped more than 50 percent since the recession ended four years ago to nearly 2.7 million — the most on government records dating to 1990. In no other sector has hiring come close.
Driving the trend are lingering uncertainty about the economy and employers' desire for more flexibility in matching their payrolls to their revenue. Some employers have also sought to sidestep the new health care law's rule that they provide medical coverage for permanent workers. Last week, though, the Obama administration delayed that provision of the law for a year.
The use of temps has extended into sectors that seldom used them in the past — professional services, for example, which include lawyers, doctors and information technology specialists.
Temps typically receive low pay, few benefits and scant job security. That makes them less likely to spend freely, so temp jobs don't tend to boost the economy the way permanent jobs do. More temps and contract workers also help explain why pay has barely outpaced inflation since the recession ended.
Beyond economic uncertainty, Ethan Harris, global economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, thinks more lasting changes are taking root.
"There's been a generational shift toward a less committed relationship between the firm and the worker," Harris says.
An Associated Press survey of 37 economists in May found that three-quarters thought the increased use of temps and contract workers represented a long-standing trend.
Typical of that trend is Latrese Carr, who was hired by a Wal-Mart in Glenwood, Ill., two months ago on a 90-day contract. She works 10 p.m. to 7 a.m., helping unload trucks and restocking shelves. Her pay is $9.45 an hour. There's no health insurance or other benefits.
Carr, 20, didn't particularly want the overnight shift.
"I needed a job," she says.
The store managers have said some temps will be kept on permanently, Carr says, depending on their performance.
Carr isn't counting on it.
The trend toward contract workers was intensified by the depth of the recession and the tepid pace of the recovery. A heavy investment in long-term employment isn't a cost all companies want to bear anymore.
"There's much more appreciation of the importance of having flexibility in the workforce," says Barry Asin of Staffing Industry Analysts, a consulting firm.
Susan Houseman, an economist at the Upjohn Institute of Employment Research, says companies want to avoid having too many employees during a downturn, just as manufacturers want to avoid having too much inventory if demand slows.
"You have your just-in-time workforce," Houseman says. "You only pay them when you need them."
This marks a shift from what economists used to call "labor hoarding": Companies typically retained most of their staff throughout recessions, hoping to ride out the downturn.
"We clearly don't have that anymore," says Sylvia Allegretto, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley.
The result is that temps and contract workers have become fixtures at large companies. Business executives say they help their companies stay competitive. They also argue that temp work can provide valuable experience.
"It opens more doors for people to enter the labor market," says Jeff Joerres, CEO of ManpowerGroup, a workplace staffing firm.
But Houseman's research has found that even when jobs are classified as "temp to permanent," only 27 percent of such assignments lead to permanent positions.
About one-third of temporary workers work in manufacturing. Temps can be found on production lines, repairing machinery and stocking goods in warehouses. About a fifth are administrative.
Shortages of doctors and nurses have led some hospitals to turn to temp agencies. Staffing Industry Analysts forecasts that spending on temporary doctors will grow 10 percent this year and next.
Some school districts now turn to temp firms for substitute teachers. This lets them avoid providing retirement benefits, which union contracts might otherwise require.
Manufacturing unions have pushed back against the trend, with limited success.
"We run into this across all the various industries where we represent people," says Tony Montana, a spokesman for the USW, which represents workers in the steel, paper, and energy industries.
Todd Miller, CEO of software company Gwabbit in Carmel Valley, Calif., says about a third of his 20 employees are temporary. An additional one-third are contractors.
He says he's had no trouble filling such positions. People are "willing to entertain employment possibilities that they would not have six or seven years ago," Miller says.
If the economy were to accelerate, Miller says he might hire more permanent staff. But "I don't have tremendous confidence in this economy."
Only the health care and leisure and hospitality sectors have added more jobs during the recovery. But each is roughly five times as large as the temp industry. The proportion of all jobs in the temp industry is about 2 percent, just below a record set in 2000.
Temp hiring has accelerated even though the economy has 2.4 million fewer jobs than it did five years ago. Temp jobs made up about 10 percent of jobs lost to the recession. Yet they've made up nearly 20 percent of the jobs gained since the recession ended.
A survey of companies with more than 1,000 employees by Staffing Industry Analysts found they expect 18 percent of their workforces to be made up of temps, freelancers or contract workers this year, up from 16 percent in 2012.
Shane Watson, who in November lost a job providing tech support for Blackberry maker Research In Motion, says contract work has helped him recover. He's on his third such position. Still, Watson, 36, misses the security of a permanent job.
Wal-Mart says it's been hiring disproportionately more temporary workers. "Flexible associates," it calls them. Spokesman Dave Tovar says temps allow store managers to provide permanent workers with more reliable schedules.
Online competitors are seeking to upend the temp industry just as Amazon and eBay disrupted retail. Employers spent $1 billion last year hiring workers for short-term projects through online labor exchanges, such as oDesk and Elance, according to Staffing Industry Analysts. That's 67 percent more than in the previous year.
Freelancers in the online exchanges can be evaluated by employers, post portfolios and take online tests to demonstrate their abilities.
Gary Swart, CEO of oDesk, says his clients are mainly small or startup companies. But giants like AOL and Unilever are using the service, too.
When Hans Hess of Arlington, Va., was seeking a lawyer to do a trademark search for his Elevation Burger chain, he turned to Elance. He found a lawyer to do it for under $500.
"When I was using a big law firm, it could cost me $5,000 to get to the point of just filing a trademark," Hess says.
Gigwalk recruits temps for brief projects in retail, merchandising and marketing. Anyone who downloads Gigwalk's app can see pinpoints on a map signifying available jobs nearby.
Frito-Lay, a division of PepsiCo, used Gigwalk this year to hire workers to check in-store displays of its products to ensure that a seasonal promotion was being handled properly.
"You can hire 10,000 people for 10 to 15 minutes," says Gigwalk CEO Bob Bahramipour. "When they're done, those 10,000 people just melt away."
http://news.yahoo.com/temporary-jobs-becoming-permanent-fixture-140133833.html
Temporary jobs becoming a permanent fixture in US
Temporary jobs becoming a permanent fixture in US as more employers seek 'just-in-time' labor
By Christopher s. Rugaber, AP Economics Writer | Associated Press
3 hrs ago
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Hiring is exploding in the one corner of the U.S. economy where few want to be hired: Temporary work.
From Wal-Mart to General Motors to PepsiCo, companies are increasingly turning to temps and to a much larger universe of freelancers, contract workers and consultants. Combined, these workers number nearly 17 million people who have only tenuous ties to the companies that pay them — about 12 percent of everyone with a job.
Hiring is always healthy for an economy. Yet the rise in temp and contract work shows that many employers aren't willing to hire for the long run.
The number of temps has jumped more than 50 percent since the recession ended four years ago to nearly 2.7 million — the most on government records dating to 1990. In no other sector has hiring come close.
Driving the trend are lingering uncertainty about the economy and employers' desire for more flexibility in matching their payrolls to their revenue. Some employers have also sought to sidestep the new health care law's rule that they provide medical coverage for permanent workers. Last week, though, the Obama administration delayed that provision of the law for a year.
The use of temps has extended into sectors that seldom used them in the past — professional services, for example, which include lawyers, doctors and information technology specialists.
Temps typically receive low pay, few benefits and scant job security. That makes them less likely to spend freely, so temp jobs don't tend to boost the economy the way permanent jobs do. More temps and contract workers also help explain why pay has barely outpaced inflation since the recession ended.
Beyond economic uncertainty, Ethan Harris, global economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, thinks more lasting changes are taking root.
"There's been a generational shift toward a less committed relationship between the firm and the worker," Harris says.
An Associated Press survey of 37 economists in May found that three-quarters thought the increased use of temps and contract workers represented a long-standing trend.
Typical of that trend is Latrese Carr, who was hired by a Wal-Mart in Glenwood, Ill., two months ago on a 90-day contract. She works 10 p.m. to 7 a.m., helping unload trucks and restocking shelves. Her pay is $9.45 an hour. There's no health insurance or other benefits.
Carr, 20, didn't particularly want the overnight shift.
"I needed a job," she says.
The store managers have said some temps will be kept on permanently, Carr says, depending on their performance.
Carr isn't counting on it.
The trend toward contract workers was intensified by the depth of the recession and the tepid pace of the recovery. A heavy investment in long-term employment isn't a cost all companies want to bear anymore.
"There's much more appreciation of the importance of having flexibility in the workforce," says Barry Asin of Staffing Industry Analysts, a consulting firm.
Susan Houseman, an economist at the Upjohn Institute of Employment Research, says companies want to avoid having too many employees during a downturn, just as manufacturers want to avoid having too much inventory if demand slows.
"You have your just-in-time workforce," Houseman says. "You only pay them when you need them."
This marks a shift from what economists used to call "labor hoarding": Companies typically retained most of their staff throughout recessions, hoping to ride out the downturn.
"We clearly don't have that anymore," says Sylvia Allegretto, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley.
The result is that temps and contract workers have become fixtures at large companies. Business executives say they help their companies stay competitive. They also argue that temp work can provide valuable experience.
"It opens more doors for people to enter the labor market," says Jeff Joerres, CEO of ManpowerGroup, a workplace staffing firm.
But Houseman's research has found that even when jobs are classified as "temp to permanent," only 27 percent of such assignments lead to permanent positions.
About one-third of temporary workers work in manufacturing. Temps can be found on production lines, repairing machinery and stocking goods in warehouses. About a fifth are administrative.
Shortages of doctors and nurses have led some hospitals to turn to temp agencies. Staffing Industry Analysts forecasts that spending on temporary doctors will grow 10 percent this year and next.
Some school districts now turn to temp firms for substitute teachers. This lets them avoid providing retirement benefits, which union contracts might otherwise require.
Manufacturing unions have pushed back against the trend, with limited success.
"We run into this across all the various industries where we represent people," says Tony Montana, a spokesman for the USW, which represents workers in the steel, paper, and energy industries.
Todd Miller, CEO of software company Gwabbit in Carmel Valley, Calif., says about a third of his 20 employees are temporary. An additional one-third are contractors.
He says he's had no trouble filling such positions. People are "willing to entertain employment possibilities that they would not have six or seven years ago," Miller says.
If the economy were to accelerate, Miller says he might hire more permanent staff. But "I don't have tremendous confidence in this economy."
Only the health care and leisure and hospitality sectors have added more jobs during the recovery. But each is roughly five times as large as the temp industry. The proportion of all jobs in the temp industry is about 2 percent, just below a record set in 2000.
Temp hiring has accelerated even though the economy has 2.4 million fewer jobs than it did five years ago. Temp jobs made up about 10 percent of jobs lost to the recession. Yet they've made up nearly 20 percent of the jobs gained since the recession ended.
A survey of companies with more than 1,000 employees by Staffing Industry Analysts found they expect 18 percent of their workforces to be made up of temps, freelancers or contract workers this year, up from 16 percent in 2012.
Shane Watson, who in November lost a job providing tech support for Blackberry maker Research In Motion, says contract work has helped him recover. He's on his third such position. Still, Watson, 36, misses the security of a permanent job.
Wal-Mart says it's been hiring disproportionately more temporary workers. "Flexible associates," it calls them. Spokesman Dave Tovar says temps allow store managers to provide permanent workers with more reliable schedules.
Online competitors are seeking to upend the temp industry just as Amazon and eBay disrupted retail. Employers spent $1 billion last year hiring workers for short-term projects through online labor exchanges, such as oDesk and Elance, according to Staffing Industry Analysts. That's 67 percent more than in the previous year.
Freelancers in the online exchanges can be evaluated by employers, post portfolios and take online tests to demonstrate their abilities.
Gary Swart, CEO of oDesk, says his clients are mainly small or startup companies. But giants like AOL and Unilever are using the service, too.
When Hans Hess of Arlington, Va., was seeking a lawyer to do a trademark search for his Elevation Burger chain, he turned to Elance. He found a lawyer to do it for under $500.
"When I was using a big law firm, it could cost me $5,000 to get to the point of just filing a trademark," Hess says.
Gigwalk recruits temps for brief projects in retail, merchandising and marketing. Anyone who downloads Gigwalk's app can see pinpoints on a map signifying available jobs nearby.
Frito-Lay, a division of PepsiCo, used Gigwalk this year to hire workers to check in-store displays of its products to ensure that a seasonal promotion was being handled properly.
"You can hire 10,000 people for 10 to 15 minutes," says Gigwalk CEO Bob Bahramipour. "When they're done, those 10,000 people just melt away."
http://news.yahoo.com/temporary-jobs-becoming-permanent-fixture-140133833.html
Corporate profit margins just hit another all-time high.
Wages as a percent of the economy just hit another all-time low.
May 2013
http://www.businessinsider.com/profits-at-high-wages-at-low-2013-4
The major ongoing story that the "corporate media" refuses to highlight is the destruction of the middle-class & the working class in America.
The media is now part of what President Eisenhower first called the "military-industrial-complex"; it has now metastasized into the "military-industrial-media-complex".
This "corporate media" will spend dozens-of-hours of prime time television time interviewing talking heads opining about Paula Dean's use of the word ******, including 30 minutes of commercial free airtime with Paula herself -- but this same corporate media will NOT broadcast the stories below with even 1% of the airtime given to the Paula Dean car wreck.
Congress has a 10% approval rating; the lowest ever. The voter participation rate in the recent mayoral election in one of America's major cities Los Angeles reached a stunning low of 15%. The complete voter apathy that the oligarchs that run the "military-industrial-media-complex" have long wanted is here, unless there is a sudden awakening. In the state of North Carolina people are belatedly waking up as the RepubliKlans have taken over their state and are taking the state back to the year 1950 -- but it was their failure to go-to-the-polls in the NON Presidential year elections that gave the RepubliKlans unfettered political power.
Is it too late to prevent full-fledged feudalism in America??
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Temporary jobs becoming a permanent fixture in US
by Christopher S. Rugaber | July 7, 2013
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2013-07-07/temporary-jobs-becoming-a-permanent-fixture-in-us<div align="right"><!-- MSTableType="layout" --><img src="http://i.minus.com/i7PiSKhrBbm9m.jpg" align="right"></div>
"We are 80% down the road to feudalism"
76% of Americans Are Living Paycheck-to-Paycheck
June 24, 2013 | http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/24/pf/emergency-savings/index.html
Roughly three-quarters of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck, with little to no emergency savings, according to a survey released by Bankrate.com Monday.<div align="right"><!-- MSTableType="layout" -->
<img src="http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/SAVINGS.png" align="right"></div>
<span style="background-color: #FFFF00"><b>Fewer than one in four Americans have enough money in their savings account to cover at least six months of expenses, enough to help cushion the blow of a job loss, medical emergency or some other unexpected event, according to the survey of 1,000 adults. Meanwhile, 50% of those surveyed have less than a three-month cushion and 27% had no savings at all.</b></span>
"It's disappointing," said Greg McBride, Bankrate.com's senior financial analyst. "Nothing helps you sleep better at night than knowing you have money tucked away for unplanned expenses."
Even more disappointing: The savings rates have barely changed over the past three years, even though a larger percentage of consumers report an increase in job security, a higher net worth and an overall better financial situation.
So why aren't Americans saving more?
<span style="background-color: #FFFF00"><b>Last week, online lender CashNetUSA said 22% of the 1,000 people it recently surveyed had less than $100 in savings to cover an emergency, while 46% had less than $800. After paying debts and taking care of housing, car and child care-related expenses, the respondents said there just isn't enough money left over for saving more.</b></span>
"There really hasn't been much relief," said Megan Stanton, director of marketing for CashNetUSA. "The economy is stagnant, $100 is not enough to help you out in an emergency."
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McDonald's Worker Was Required to Receive Pay on Fee-Laden Debit Card
June 17, 2013 | http://abcnews.go.com/Business/mcdo...ise-paying-wages-debit-card/story?id=19420181
All Natalie Gunshannon wanted was to be paid a fair wage for her work, she said.<div align="right"><!-- MSTableType="layout" -->
<img src="http://a.abcnews.com/images/Business/ht_natalie_gunshannon_jef_130617_wg.jpg" width="350" align="right"></div>
Natalie Gunshannon, 27, a single mother of one daughter, of Dallas Township, worked at McDonald's Restaurant on the Dallas Highway from April 24 to May 15. When she received her first paycheck, enclosed was a Chase Bank debit card with instructions on how to use it and the fees attached.
She was paid about $7.44 per hour.
Her future earnings would be deposited into the debit card account and she could access her money from there. Gunshannon never signed the card and when she returned to work she asked her supervisor if she could be paid by check or by direct deposit. She was told the card was the only option.
<span style="background-color: #FFFF00"><b>The JP Morgan Chase payroll card she was given lists several fees, including a $1.50 charge for ATM withdrawals, $5 for over-the-counter cash withdrawals, $1 per balance inquiry, 75 cents per online bill payment and $15 for lost/stolen card.</b></span>
Gunshannon said she didn't sign the card and chose to not enroll in the payroll system offered because she felt the fees would be exorbitant and actually drop her earnings below minimum wage.
Gunshannon, quit her job at McDonald's and went to see an attorney, Mike Cefalo of West Pittston. A class-action lawsuit was filed Thursday in Luzerne County Court by Cefalo on behalf of Gunshannon and other employees, seeking damages, fees and costs.
The suit seeks an unspecified amount of monetary damages and asks for punitive, compensatory and liquidated damages, plus legal fees and litigation costs against the company for its "ill-gotten gains contrary to justice, equity, good conscience and Pennsylvania law."
Cefalo called the payroll system "another example of corporate greed."
Cefalo said the debit card method and its fees are "squeezing the most vulnerable of our society. They make minimum wage or a little more and they squeeze money from them."
Cefalo said many more people are coming forward and telling the same stories. Pennsylvania law states employees are entitled to have a choice to be paid by check or cash, he said.
"When they work hard and earn their wages, why should they have to pay fees to collect their rightful wages?" Cefalo asked.
Gunshannon said she is looking for another job and the first question she asks is how employees are paid.
"I need to receive all the money I earn," she said.
"I can't afford to lose even a few dollars per paycheck. I just think people should be paid fairly and not have to pay fees to get their wages."
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The oligarchs plan for America is to have as many people as possible scrambling for survival as you see in the video below.
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Wages Fall At Record Pace
<img src="http://nationalmemo.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/themes/nm/images/columnists/DavidCayJohnston.jpg" width="175">
by David Cay Johnston | June 20, 2013 |http://www.nationalmemo.com/wages-fall-at-record-pace/
Breaking news alert! Wages fell at the fastest rate ever recorded during the first quarter of this year, the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported.http://www.bls.gov/news.release/prod2.nr0.htm[b
Hourly wages fell 3.8 percent in the first quarter, the biggest drop since the BLS began tracking compensation in 1947. Productivity rose half a percentage point. The result was that what economists call “labor unit costs” fell 4.3 percent.
In plain English, that means paychecks overall shrank, but work output grew. If you are a business owner, that is news worthy of a toast with a bottle of the finest Cristal champagne, which at $595 is more than the $518 that a median-wage worker earns in a week.
If you have not heard this news about plummeting wages, it is not surprising. Except for right-wing websites, and an item at the liberal Huffington Post, the June 5 announcement went unreported.
The networks and the major newspapers all have staffs of business reporters, yet they missed the third paragraph of the official government announcement that contained this important news.
That is because they are mostly assigned to write about hedge funds, high finance and the latest smartphone app. Hardly any business reporters cover workers or work, and when they do, it is often from the perspective of company executives and investors.
My former employer, The New York Times, not only failed to report this awful news affecting the vast majority of Americans who work, but gave a misleading account in both a news report and a blog post:
Average weekly hours and average hourly earnings, for example, have shown little improvement in recent months, according to the Labor Department.
That is true, by the way. Misleading and incomplete, but true. It is also in line with that paper’s tradition of focusing readers on any silver lining in an economic storm.
What the Times reports matters a great deal, as every other news organization turns to it first because of its unmatched resources and talent. But that also means that when that newspaper misses, or muffs, a story, so does everyone else.
It is not like this new wage news can be dismissed as an anomaly, either. It is evidence of a troubling trend – falling incomes for the 99 percent.
Pay for most jobs has been falling because of a combination of anti-union rules that have reduced membership to its lowest level in almost a century, trade deals with China that have destroyed 2.8 million jobs and put pressure on workers to accept lower pay to compete with imports, and the severe cuts in welfare benefits over the past two decades, which have flooded the market with low-wage workers. America ranks second only to South Korea in the share of workers earning low wages, both at about one job in four.
At the same time, taxpayers have been giving ever-larger subsidies to employers, notably Walmart, many of whose workers need food stamps.
From 2007 to 2011 the average pretax income of the bottom 90 percent fell from $35,173 to $30,437. That is a drop of more than $4,500. It is also a decline of nearly 13 percent.
The 2012 data are likely to show that drop has worsened, with the vast majority’s average income likely to be down $5,000, or roughly $100 per week. We’ll see how well that gets reported in the fall when new data becomes available.
By the way, if you make a good living, or your household enjoys two above-average incomes, don’t think that you are exempt from this trend toward less.
During the same period, the threshold to enter the top 10 percent fell by 6.5 percent, a drop of $7,665 to $110,651, analysis of the latest IRS data by economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty shows.
This drop in income is part of a long-term trend in which the economy grows, but nearly all the gains go to the top. From 2009 to 2011 the top 1 percent got 121 percent of all the gains, which was possible only because the 99 percent got less.
In 2011, the top tenth of one percent got 7.4 percent of all the income in America, up from 2.2 percent the year Ronald Reagan took office as president, a fact reported in only a few news articles.
For the bottom half of taxpayers the decline has been brutal. In 2010 the bottom half of Americans averaged just under $15,300 per household in reported income. Every household in the bottom half made less than $32,400 in income, IRS data posted by the conservative Tax Foundation shows.
More than a third of all workers, 51 million of them, made less than $15,000 in 2011. Half of workers, 75 million people, earned less than $27,000, which is $519 a week with no vacation. That figure has been essentially flat since 1999.
Did you know these figures? Did you know half of households get only about $1,100 a month? If you do, you are part of a very small and well-informed minority. Please spread this news to the vast, ill-informed majority of Americans by telling everyone you know what you read here at National Memo, but not in your morning newspaper.
The reasons a record fall in pay was not mainstream news are hard to fathom. But, sadly, what was once a mass medium that drew many reporters from the working class and intellectual blue-collar families has become so focused on high-income readers, listeners and viewers that institutional views of what is news change.
The stock options granted to executives, reported almost as a competition to see which CEO can make the most for the least performance, make the news. I played a role in that trend, showing in 1996 how journalists were systematically under-reporting executive pay by a lot. What happened since is a surprising personal lesson in the law of unintended consequences.
Today’s news organizations focus much more on investors than workers or consumers. They tend to view banking through the eyes of the few who invest in banks rather than the vastly larger audience who have bank accounts. But then mutual funds and banks buy ads and the investors in them tend to have high incomes, which in turn helps them afford the $25 to $65 monthly cost of newspaper home delivery.
For TV and radio, advertisers also want younger people in the top half — and preferably top quarter — of the income distribution, not the half of workers making less than $518 a week.
Concern about falling wages is also influenced by the heavily marketed idea that we need lower pay to have a strong economy. That may explain why falling wages have been reported as news by Drudge, the website of Fox, the libertarian California newspaper The Orange County Register and the like.
Higher minimum wages, the corporate economists and right-wing news organizations say, destroy jobs. The Chicago School sect of neoclassical economics, which dominates in America, teaches that as dogma. It is not, however, what empirical research shows.
Falling wages mean less disposable income, which in turn means there is less reason for corporations to invest because there is less money to buy products and services. It also means less in tax revenues than if we pursued a high-wage strategy and, at the same time, included in the idea of markets the actual ability of workers to collectively negotiate their compensation just as our economic competitors do.
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The oligarchs plan for America is to have as many people as possible scrambling for survival as you see in the video below.
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The Rich Are Getting Richer... And Going Shopping
Retailers are running away from the middle class — four out of five Americans are struggling to make ends meet
by Laura Heller | August 5, 2013 | http://theweek.com/article/index/247598/the-rich-are-getting-richer-and-going-shopping#
Several economic trends are redefining the retail landscape and continuing the bifurcation of the U.S. population. Just call us barbell nation.
The barbell effect has U.S. retailers concerned as the middle class gets squeezed and shoppers increasingly fall into the very high or very low end of the consumer spectrum. Simply put, the rich are getting richer and the middle class is getting poorer — and our retail stores reflect this.
I recently wrote about America's Dollar Store Revolution and the growing number of retail outlets serving the growing number of low-income shoppers. Family Dollar, Dollar General, and Dollar Tree collectively operate close to 30,000 locations, with new units popping up almost daily. Their growth is propelled by the growth of the lower class, as four out of five Americans are struggling to make ends meet.
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We are a nation of segregated shoppers, where the haves shop at Neiman's and Nordstrom and the have-nots shop at dollar stores.</b></span>
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"In 2003, there were 56,100 families worth $50 million or more controlling, in the aggregate, $11.8 trillion," David Friedman, president of Wealth-X, told Forbes. "Today there are 107,100 families worth $50 million or more. That's an increase of 6.7 percent annually. These families control $22.9 trillion, which is an increase of 6.9 percent annually."</b></span>
The "ultra wealthy" don't just have a disproportionate amount of the nation's wealth, they do a disproportionate amount of spending given the size of its cohort, and more retailers are trying to woo this group. Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, and Saks Fifth Ave. all cater to this group.
But those stores don't cater to the rest of us. Consider this: Every year, Chicago kicks off holiday shopping with the Magnificent Mile Lights Festival. Sponsor Disney makes sure the event draws families from all walks of life to Michigan Avenue on the Saturday before Thanksgiving to see a parade and the lighting of the shopping district's holiday lights. The event was founded by the area merchants association and is meant to give retailers a leg up on holiday sales.
Except for those retailers that cater to luxury buyers. Neiman Marcus, Cartier, Escada, and Chanel close early. These stores are not for casual shoppers. They don't want browsers.
What of upper middle class buyers who might splurge on a big purchase from time to time? That shopper is rare and getting rarer. And the middle-class squeeze is also squeezing out middle market retailers. Sears, J.C. Penney, and even Kohl's — once the darlings of Wall Street — are suffering, trying to find themselves in a bifurcated (barbell) retail landscape.
Consider Sears. The mid-range department store is going after luxury buyers, announcing recently that it will sell designer goods in its online marketplace via third-party vendors. Meanwhile, Sears Marketplace is set up to compete with Amazon and eBay, allowing third parties to list and sell goods not found at Sears and Kmart stores.
Will luxury shoppers buy Rolex watches and Jimmy Choos from Sears.com? Most retail industry pundits doubt it. And while it could be one more desperate play from stuck-in-the-middle Sears, it points to where the money's at in retail — at either end of the barbell.
<hr noshade color="#0000FF" size="6"></hr>
The oligarchs plan for America is to have as many people as possible scrambling for survival as you see in the video below.
<hr noshade color="#0000FF" size="6"></hr>
The Rich Are Getting Richer... And Going Shopping
Retailers are running away from the middle class — four out of five Americans are struggling to make ends meet
by Laura Heller | August 5, 2013 | http://theweek.com/article/index/247598/the-rich-are-getting-richer-and-going-shopping#
Several economic trends are redefining the retail landscape and continuing the bifurcation of the U.S. population. Just call us barbell nation.
The barbell effect has U.S. retailers concerned as the middle class gets squeezed and shoppers increasingly fall into the very high or very low end of the consumer spectrum. Simply put, the rich are getting richer and the middle class is getting poorer — and our retail stores reflect this.
I recently wrote about America's Dollar Store Revolution and the growing number of retail outlets serving the growing number of low-income shoppers. Family Dollar, Dollar General, and Dollar Tree collectively operate close to 30,000 locations, with new units popping up almost daily. Their growth is propelled by the growth of the lower class, as four out of five Americans are struggling to make ends meet.
<SPAN STYLE="background-color:YELLOW"><b>
We are a nation of segregated shoppers, where the haves shop at Neiman's and Nordstrom and the have-nots shop at dollar stores.</b></span>
<SPAN STYLE="background-color:YELLOW"><b>
"In 2003, there were 56,100 families worth $50 million or more controlling, in the aggregate, $11.8 trillion," David Friedman, president of Wealth-X, told Forbes. "Today there are 107,100 families worth $50 million or more. That's an increase of 6.7 percent annually. These families control $22.9 trillion, which is an increase of 6.9 percent annually."</b></span>
The "ultra wealthy" don't just have a disproportionate amount of the nation's wealth, they do a disproportionate amount of spending given the size of its cohort, and more retailers are trying to woo this group. Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, and Saks Fifth Ave. all cater to this group.
But those stores don't cater to the rest of us. Consider this: Every year, Chicago kicks off holiday shopping with the Magnificent Mile Lights Festival. Sponsor Disney makes sure the event draws families from all walks of life to Michigan Avenue on the Saturday before Thanksgiving to see a parade and the lighting of the shopping district's holiday lights. The event was founded by the area merchants association and is meant to give retailers a leg up on holiday sales.
Except for those retailers that cater to luxury buyers. Neiman Marcus, Cartier, Escada, and Chanel close early. These stores are not for casual shoppers. They don't want browsers.
What of upper middle class buyers who might splurge on a big purchase from time to time? That shopper is rare and getting rarer. And the middle-class squeeze is also squeezing out middle market retailers. Sears, J.C. Penney, and even Kohl's — once the darlings of Wall Street — are suffering, trying to find themselves in a bifurcated (barbell) retail landscape.
Consider Sears. The mid-range department store is going after luxury buyers, announcing recently that it will sell designer goods in its online marketplace via third-party vendors. Meanwhile, Sears Marketplace is set up to compete with Amazon and eBay, allowing third parties to list and sell goods not found at Sears and Kmart stores.
Will luxury shoppers buy Rolex watches and Jimmy Choos from Sears.com? Most retail industry pundits doubt it. And while it could be one more desperate play from stuck-in-the-middle Sears, it points to where the money's at in retail — at either end of the barbell.
<hr noshade color="#0000FF" size="6"></hr>
The oligarchs plan for America is to have as many people as possible scrambling for survival as you see in the video below.
<hr noshade color="#0000FF" size="6"></hr>
source: Think Progress
Hostess Twinkies Return To Shelves While Unionized Jobs Disappear
Twinkies, one of the best known snacks made by Hostess Brands, are back on shelves on Monday after the company filed for bankruptcy late last year. Yet jobs at the company aren’t coming back with the dessert. While 18,500 people worked for the company before it filed, only about 20 to 25 percent of those jobs will return when all of the brands are brought back, according to an industry analyst.
Hostess used to employ about 2,500 workers to produce snacks, but the new iteration will use just 1,800, according to a spokeswoman for its new private equity owners. The reduction in jobs is thanks to an increasing use of machinery instead of workers, dropping some of the former Hostess brands, a new model for delivering products, and closing nearly 600 outlet stores in which it used to sell products directly to consumers.
Those who do get their job back won’t see the same pay, however. Employees are now making far less than they were before the liquidation.
And the workers who are hired back will no longer be unionized. Where nearly 80 percent of the workers were part of a union before the liquidation, today none will be.
The company has struggled with workers’ issues since it filed. In December, the acting CEO imposed an 8 percent pay cut across the board for all Hostess employees, yet his own $1.5 million yearly salary was exempt. It also asked for approval from a bankruptcy judge shortly after it filed to allow it to pay $1.75 million in bonuses to 19 of its executives. And even though the company blamed unions for its downfall, it tripled its CEO’s pay before the bankruptcy filing and increased other executives’ compensation by as much as 80 percent.
Other companies have demanded concessions from unionized workers as executives have enjoyed raises: Construction giant Caterpillar gave its CEO a 60 percent pay raise to $17 million as it forced a pay and pension freeze on workers. Other companies have compensated executives in times of bankruptcy or financial instability. Failed financial firm MF Global awarded CEO Jon Corzine $8 million after filing, while Vikram Pandit got $6.7 million after he resigned as CEO of Citigroup even though he oversaw an 88 percent profit loss in his final quarter.
Hostess Twinkies Return To Shelves While Unionized Jobs Disappear
Twinkies, one of the best known snacks made by Hostess Brands, are back on shelves on Monday after the company filed for bankruptcy late last year. Yet jobs at the company aren’t coming back with the dessert. While 18,500 people worked for the company before it filed, only about 20 to 25 percent of those jobs will return when all of the brands are brought back, according to an industry analyst.
Hostess used to employ about 2,500 workers to produce snacks, but the new iteration will use just 1,800, according to a spokeswoman for its new private equity owners. The reduction in jobs is thanks to an increasing use of machinery instead of workers, dropping some of the former Hostess brands, a new model for delivering products, and closing nearly 600 outlet stores in which it used to sell products directly to consumers.
Those who do get their job back won’t see the same pay, however. Employees are now making far less than they were before the liquidation.
And the workers who are hired back will no longer be unionized. Where nearly 80 percent of the workers were part of a union before the liquidation, today none will be.
The company has struggled with workers’ issues since it filed. In December, the acting CEO imposed an 8 percent pay cut across the board for all Hostess employees, yet his own $1.5 million yearly salary was exempt. It also asked for approval from a bankruptcy judge shortly after it filed to allow it to pay $1.75 million in bonuses to 19 of its executives. And even though the company blamed unions for its downfall, it tripled its CEO’s pay before the bankruptcy filing and increased other executives’ compensation by as much as 80 percent.
Other companies have demanded concessions from unionized workers as executives have enjoyed raises: Construction giant Caterpillar gave its CEO a 60 percent pay raise to $17 million as it forced a pay and pension freeze on workers. Other companies have compensated executives in times of bankruptcy or financial instability. Failed financial firm MF Global awarded CEO Jon Corzine $8 million after filing, while Vikram Pandit got $6.7 million after he resigned as CEO of Citigroup even though he oversaw an 88 percent profit loss in his final quarter.
Will Robots Take All Our Blue-Collar Jobs?
Will Robots Take All Our Blue-Collar Jobs?
By the Editors
Aug 13, 2013 10:47 AM CT
Imagine you’re a young worker, pondering your job prospects in the economy of the future. Your grades weren’t exactly stellar, and you realize a four-year college isn’t for you. What kind of career should you look for?
Your options are narrowing. Many traditional working-class jobs -- from truck driving to administrative work to retail to tending bar -- are being replaced by automated technology. The trend seems likely to accelerate. How do we ensure that the kids of tomorrow can do something useful? And how do we help today’s working class transition to the economy of the future?
The most immediate challenge will be restructuring vocational schools to prepare students to do jobs that robots can’t and to take advantage of technology in new ways. Three skills in particular will still be useful in the new economy, as Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argued in a recent report for the research group Third Way: solving unstructured problems, working with new information and doing manual tasks that can’t easily be automated.
So some skilled trades -- plumbing, carpentry, electric work -- will probably remain beyond the capabilities of robots for a long time. Likewise work in unstructured environments such as gardening or housekeeping. But many other blue-collar jobs are likely to be disrupted in the next few decades and in unexpected ways. How can vocational schools prepare their students for this kind of economy?
Probably the most important step they can take is to help kids understand how to work alongside robots and other automated systems. Today’s car mechanics understand how to fix dents and transmission problems; in the future, they’ll need to know as much about self-driving technology. Firefighters today put out flames much as their grandparents did. In a few years, they may be working alongside the Firefighting Robotic Scout, which can drive into burning buildings, detect dangerous gases, find vulnerable people and beam out a sophisticated three-dimensional map. Similar robot helpers are in the works for factory laborers, police officers and health-care aides.
In short, the blue-collar jobs of the future will become more technologically sophisticated, and workers will need to know how to adapt quickly as their job descriptions change. Vocational education can prepare students by fostering skills such as problem-solving and communication, and by shifting away from the narrow occupational training it currently focuses on -- because such training will quickly grow obsolete.
What about today’s blue-collar workers? Already, their skills are poorly matched with employers’ needs: The U.S. unemployment rate has been above 7 percent for more than four years, yet roughly 3.9 million positions still went unfilled in June, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In some ways, this is a much thornier problem. President Barack Obama has pushed to expand funding for job training at community colleges and to establish a network of regional manufacturing hubs that can bring together academia, private employers and the government to foster innovation and retrain workers. Federally registered apprenticeship programs -- in which young workers can get on-the-job training in technical skills, often with help from state tax breaks -- have also shown great promise. All this is on the right track, but may ultimately prove insufficient.
As we’ve argued before, governments around the world will need to respond more ambitiously to help workers and businesses navigate this change. That means efforts such as shifting the tax burden toward consumption rather than labor, helping entrepreneurs create new businesses that can combine robotic efficiency with human creativity, and reforming patent and immigration systems that belong to an earlier technological era. Because robotic labor will probably worsen inequality by shifting income from workers to owners of capital, governments will also need to rethink how to strengthen their social safety nets.
Eventually, as automation advances, even college graduates will find their careers disrupted: Doctors, lawyers and securities traders have all seen some of their work replaced by machines in recent years. (Journalists aren’t immune, either.) Yet as so often happens when creative destruction churns through economies, the lowest-skilled workers stand to be hit first, and hardest.
The best place to start preparing them for this change, as for most things in life, is in the classroom.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-13/will-robots-take-all-our-blue-collar-jobs-.html
Will Robots Take All Our Blue-Collar Jobs?
By the Editors
Aug 13, 2013 10:47 AM CT
Imagine you’re a young worker, pondering your job prospects in the economy of the future. Your grades weren’t exactly stellar, and you realize a four-year college isn’t for you. What kind of career should you look for?
Your options are narrowing. Many traditional working-class jobs -- from truck driving to administrative work to retail to tending bar -- are being replaced by automated technology. The trend seems likely to accelerate. How do we ensure that the kids of tomorrow can do something useful? And how do we help today’s working class transition to the economy of the future?
The most immediate challenge will be restructuring vocational schools to prepare students to do jobs that robots can’t and to take advantage of technology in new ways. Three skills in particular will still be useful in the new economy, as Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argued in a recent report for the research group Third Way: solving unstructured problems, working with new information and doing manual tasks that can’t easily be automated.
So some skilled trades -- plumbing, carpentry, electric work -- will probably remain beyond the capabilities of robots for a long time. Likewise work in unstructured environments such as gardening or housekeeping. But many other blue-collar jobs are likely to be disrupted in the next few decades and in unexpected ways. How can vocational schools prepare their students for this kind of economy?
Probably the most important step they can take is to help kids understand how to work alongside robots and other automated systems. Today’s car mechanics understand how to fix dents and transmission problems; in the future, they’ll need to know as much about self-driving technology. Firefighters today put out flames much as their grandparents did. In a few years, they may be working alongside the Firefighting Robotic Scout, which can drive into burning buildings, detect dangerous gases, find vulnerable people and beam out a sophisticated three-dimensional map. Similar robot helpers are in the works for factory laborers, police officers and health-care aides.
In short, the blue-collar jobs of the future will become more technologically sophisticated, and workers will need to know how to adapt quickly as their job descriptions change. Vocational education can prepare students by fostering skills such as problem-solving and communication, and by shifting away from the narrow occupational training it currently focuses on -- because such training will quickly grow obsolete.
What about today’s blue-collar workers? Already, their skills are poorly matched with employers’ needs: The U.S. unemployment rate has been above 7 percent for more than four years, yet roughly 3.9 million positions still went unfilled in June, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In some ways, this is a much thornier problem. President Barack Obama has pushed to expand funding for job training at community colleges and to establish a network of regional manufacturing hubs that can bring together academia, private employers and the government to foster innovation and retrain workers. Federally registered apprenticeship programs -- in which young workers can get on-the-job training in technical skills, often with help from state tax breaks -- have also shown great promise. All this is on the right track, but may ultimately prove insufficient.
As we’ve argued before, governments around the world will need to respond more ambitiously to help workers and businesses navigate this change. That means efforts such as shifting the tax burden toward consumption rather than labor, helping entrepreneurs create new businesses that can combine robotic efficiency with human creativity, and reforming patent and immigration systems that belong to an earlier technological era. Because robotic labor will probably worsen inequality by shifting income from workers to owners of capital, governments will also need to rethink how to strengthen their social safety nets.
Eventually, as automation advances, even college graduates will find their careers disrupted: Doctors, lawyers and securities traders have all seen some of their work replaced by machines in recent years. (Journalists aren’t immune, either.) Yet as so often happens when creative destruction churns through economies, the lowest-skilled workers stand to be hit first, and hardest.
The best place to start preparing them for this change, as for most things in life, is in the classroom.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-13/will-robots-take-all-our-blue-collar-jobs-.html
source: Think Progress
36 Senators Introduce Bill Prohibiting Virtually Any New Law Helping Workers
More than three-quarters of the Senate Republican caucus signed onto legislation introduced Wednesday by Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Rand Paul (R-KY) that could render it virtually impossible for Congress to enact any legislation intended to improve working conditions or otherwise regulate the workplace. Had their bill been in effect during the Twentieth Century, for example, there would likely be no nationwide minimum wage, no national ban on workplace discrimination, no national labor law and no overtime in most industries.
Like many Tea Party proposals to neuter the federal government, Coburn and Paul’s bill is marketed as an effort to bring America back in line with a long-ago discarded vision of the Constitution. It’s named the “Enumerated Powers Act of 2013,” a reference to the provisions of the Constitution outlining Congress’ specific powers, and it claims to require all federal legislation to “’contain a concise explanation of the specific authority in the Constitution’ that is the basis for its enactment.”
The key provision in this bill, however, would revive a discredited interpretation of the Constitution that America abandoned nearly eight decades ago. Although the text of the bill is not yet available online, a press release from Coburn’s office explains that it “[p]rohibits the use of the Commerce Clause, except for ‘the regulation of the buying and selling of goods or services, or the transporting for those purposes, across boundaries with foreign nations, across State lines, or with Indian tribes.’”
To translate this language a bit, in the late 19th Century, the Supreme Court embraced an unusually narrow interpretation of the Constitution’s provision enabling Congress to “regulate commerce . . . among the several states.” Under this narrow reading, which lasted less than half a century, the justices said that they would only permit federal laws that regulated the transport of goods for sale or a sale itself. Manufacturing, mining, production and agriculture were all held to be beyond federal regulation. This theory was the basis for several decisions striking down basic labor protections, including a 1918 decision declaring a child labor law unconstitutional.
Coburn and Paul’s bill appears to be an attempt to restore the constitutional regime that prohibited child labor regulation and other such nationwide regulation of the American workplace. While the bill does not apply retroactively — so existing labor laws would continue to function — the bill does allow a procedural objection to be raised against any new legislation that does not comply with the limits imposed by the bill. Such an objection could be used to block any most attempts to enact new workplace laws — such as a bill increasing the national minimum wage or a bill prohibiting all employers from firing workers because they are gay. Similarly, Coburn and Paul’s bill could permanently entrench decisions by the conservative Roberts Court rolling back existing protections for workers — such as a recent decision shielding many employers whose senior employees engage in sexual harassment.
Such an effort to shrink the constitutional role of government until it is small enough to be drowned in a bathtub is consistent with Paul and Coburn’s records. Last March, Paul praised a particularly infamous Supreme Court decision empowering employers to ruthlessly exploit their workers. Coburn told a town hall meeting in 2011 that Medicare and Medicaid are unconstitutional because “that’s a family responsibility, not a government responsibility.”
What is somewhat surprising, however, is the sheer breadth of support for Coburn and Paul’s discredited view of the Constitution within the Senate Republican Caucus. According to Coburn’s press release, their bill is cosponsored by “Senators Ayotte (R-NH), Barrasso (R-WY), Blunt (R-MO), Boozman (R-AR), Burr (R-NC), Chambliss (R-GA), Coats (R-IN), Corker (R-TN), Cornyn (R-TX), Crapo (R-ID), Cruz (R-TX), Enzi (R-WY), Fischer (R-NE), Flake (R-AZ), Graham (R-SC), Grassley (R-IA), Hatch (R-UT), Heller (R-NV), Inhofe (R-OK), Isakson (R-GA), Johnson (R-WI), Lee (R-UT), McCain (R-AZ), McConnell (R-KY), Moran (R-KS), Risch (R-ID), Roberts (R-KS), Rubio (R-FL), Scott (R-SC), Sessions (R-AL), Thune (R-SD), Toomey (R-PA), Vitter (R-LA), and Wicker (R-MS).”
36 Senators Introduce Bill Prohibiting Virtually Any New Law Helping Workers
More than three-quarters of the Senate Republican caucus signed onto legislation introduced Wednesday by Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Rand Paul (R-KY) that could render it virtually impossible for Congress to enact any legislation intended to improve working conditions or otherwise regulate the workplace. Had their bill been in effect during the Twentieth Century, for example, there would likely be no nationwide minimum wage, no national ban on workplace discrimination, no national labor law and no overtime in most industries.
Like many Tea Party proposals to neuter the federal government, Coburn and Paul’s bill is marketed as an effort to bring America back in line with a long-ago discarded vision of the Constitution. It’s named the “Enumerated Powers Act of 2013,” a reference to the provisions of the Constitution outlining Congress’ specific powers, and it claims to require all federal legislation to “’contain a concise explanation of the specific authority in the Constitution’ that is the basis for its enactment.”
The key provision in this bill, however, would revive a discredited interpretation of the Constitution that America abandoned nearly eight decades ago. Although the text of the bill is not yet available online, a press release from Coburn’s office explains that it “[p]rohibits the use of the Commerce Clause, except for ‘the regulation of the buying and selling of goods or services, or the transporting for those purposes, across boundaries with foreign nations, across State lines, or with Indian tribes.’”
To translate this language a bit, in the late 19th Century, the Supreme Court embraced an unusually narrow interpretation of the Constitution’s provision enabling Congress to “regulate commerce . . . among the several states.” Under this narrow reading, which lasted less than half a century, the justices said that they would only permit federal laws that regulated the transport of goods for sale or a sale itself. Manufacturing, mining, production and agriculture were all held to be beyond federal regulation. This theory was the basis for several decisions striking down basic labor protections, including a 1918 decision declaring a child labor law unconstitutional.
Coburn and Paul’s bill appears to be an attempt to restore the constitutional regime that prohibited child labor regulation and other such nationwide regulation of the American workplace. While the bill does not apply retroactively — so existing labor laws would continue to function — the bill does allow a procedural objection to be raised against any new legislation that does not comply with the limits imposed by the bill. Such an objection could be used to block any most attempts to enact new workplace laws — such as a bill increasing the national minimum wage or a bill prohibiting all employers from firing workers because they are gay. Similarly, Coburn and Paul’s bill could permanently entrench decisions by the conservative Roberts Court rolling back existing protections for workers — such as a recent decision shielding many employers whose senior employees engage in sexual harassment.
Such an effort to shrink the constitutional role of government until it is small enough to be drowned in a bathtub is consistent with Paul and Coburn’s records. Last March, Paul praised a particularly infamous Supreme Court decision empowering employers to ruthlessly exploit their workers. Coburn told a town hall meeting in 2011 that Medicare and Medicaid are unconstitutional because “that’s a family responsibility, not a government responsibility.”
What is somewhat surprising, however, is the sheer breadth of support for Coburn and Paul’s discredited view of the Constitution within the Senate Republican Caucus. According to Coburn’s press release, their bill is cosponsored by “Senators Ayotte (R-NH), Barrasso (R-WY), Blunt (R-MO), Boozman (R-AR), Burr (R-NC), Chambliss (R-GA), Coats (R-IN), Corker (R-TN), Cornyn (R-TX), Crapo (R-ID), Cruz (R-TX), Enzi (R-WY), Fischer (R-NE), Flake (R-AZ), Graham (R-SC), Grassley (R-IA), Hatch (R-UT), Heller (R-NV), Inhofe (R-OK), Isakson (R-GA), Johnson (R-WI), Lee (R-UT), McCain (R-AZ), McConnell (R-KY), Moran (R-KS), Risch (R-ID), Roberts (R-KS), Rubio (R-FL), Scott (R-SC), Sessions (R-AL), Thune (R-SD), Toomey (R-PA), Vitter (R-LA), and Wicker (R-MS).”
source: Think Progress
Four Reasons Everyone Should Thank Unions On Labor Day
Labor day is a welcome, and well-deserved, day off for millions of Americans. But it’s worth remembering that Labor day is more than just a three-day weekend. Labor Day “is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers.”
Here are four important accomplishments of the labor movement that benefit all Americans:
Four Reasons Everyone Should Thank Unions On Labor Day
Labor day is a welcome, and well-deserved, day off for millions of Americans. But it’s worth remembering that Labor day is more than just a three-day weekend. Labor Day “is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers.”
Here are four important accomplishments of the labor movement that benefit all Americans:
1. Unions Gave Us The Weekend: Even the ultra-conservative Mises Institute notes that the relatively labor-free 1870, the average workweek for most Americans was 61 hours — almost double what most Americans work now. Yet in the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century, labor unions engaged in massive strikes in order to demand shorter workweeks so that Americans could be home with their loved ones instead of constantly toiling for their employers with no leisure time. By 1937, these labor actions created enough political momentum to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act, which helped create a federal framework for a shorter workweek that included room for leisure time.
2. Unions Helped End Child Labor: “Union organizing and child labor reform were often intertwined” in U.S. history, with organizations like the “National Consumers’ League” and the “National Child Labor Committee” working together in the early 20th century to ban child labor. The very first American Federation of Labor (AFL) national convention passed “a resolution calling on states to ban children under 14 from all gainful employment” in 1881, and soon after states across the country adopted similar recommendations, leading up to the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act which regulated child labor on the federal level for the first time.
3. Unions Won Widespread Employer-Based Health Coverage: “The rise of unions in the 1930′s and 1940′s led to the first great expansion of health care” for all Americans, as labor unions banded workers together to negotiate for health coverage plans from employers. In 1942, “the US set up a National War Labor Board. It had the power to set a cap on all wage increases. But it let employers circumvent the cap by offering ‘fringe benefits’ – notably, health insurance.” By 1950, “half of all companies with fewer than 250 workers and two-thirds of all companies with more than 250 workers offered health insurance of one kind or another.”
4. Unions Spearheaded The Fight For The Family And Medical Leave Act: Labor unions like the AFL-CIO federation led the fight for this 1993 law, which “requires state agencies and private employers with more than 50 employees to provide up to 12 weeks of job-protected unpaid leave annually for workers to care for a newborn, newly adopted child, seriously ill family member or for the worker’s own illness.”
Meanwhile, as union membership as declined since 1970, the income of the middle class has plummeted.2. Unions Helped End Child Labor: “Union organizing and child labor reform were often intertwined” in U.S. history, with organizations like the “National Consumers’ League” and the “National Child Labor Committee” working together in the early 20th century to ban child labor. The very first American Federation of Labor (AFL) national convention passed “a resolution calling on states to ban children under 14 from all gainful employment” in 1881, and soon after states across the country adopted similar recommendations, leading up to the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act which regulated child labor on the federal level for the first time.
3. Unions Won Widespread Employer-Based Health Coverage: “The rise of unions in the 1930′s and 1940′s led to the first great expansion of health care” for all Americans, as labor unions banded workers together to negotiate for health coverage plans from employers. In 1942, “the US set up a National War Labor Board. It had the power to set a cap on all wage increases. But it let employers circumvent the cap by offering ‘fringe benefits’ – notably, health insurance.” By 1950, “half of all companies with fewer than 250 workers and two-thirds of all companies with more than 250 workers offered health insurance of one kind or another.”
4. Unions Spearheaded The Fight For The Family And Medical Leave Act: Labor unions like the AFL-CIO federation led the fight for this 1993 law, which “requires state agencies and private employers with more than 50 employees to provide up to 12 weeks of job-protected unpaid leave annually for workers to care for a newborn, newly adopted child, seriously ill family member or for the worker’s own illness.”
<img src="http://70.38.64.76/h/1/4cdc0a95-f295-4a66-bf98-c053fa9be7d4.png" width="600">
Labor Day Is a Scam To Keep You Poor and Miserable Forever
by Ken Layne | September 1, 2013
http://gawker.com/labor-day-is-a-scam-to-keep-you-poor-and-miserable-fore-1218081585
Labor Day is a <em>complete rip-off</em>. Labor isn't celebrated at all—instead, a single day's <em>break</em> from labor is celebrated. You might think this is a stupid thing to care about, because Labor Day is really just about getting drunk in your yard, again. But that's actually evidence of this very successful con job pulled on you, the American worker (or unemployed person, or discouraged worker, or "grad student"
. You probably don't even <em>believe </em>in Labor Day.<br>
America, as you've surely been told, is a very special country. One example of the superiority of the United States is that it managed to deport the global workers holiday called May Day. This was especially skillful because May Day began not in Russia or Finland or Middle Earth, but in Chicago, a major American city built specifically to exploit the labor of poor immigrants.<br><br>
On May 4 of 1886, police opened fire on laborers demanding an eight-hour workday. The cops had been sent over by their bosses at the slaughterhouses and City Hall to break up the rally and smash skulls. The chance to open fire on the workers conveniently arrived when a crude bomb was tossed toward the coppers by persons unknown; eight local anarchists were rounded up and convicted—four of them were slowly strangled in an intentionally botched public hanging, while a fifth condemned man blew off a significant portion of his own head by chewing on a blasting cap he'd smuggled into prison.<br>
The phony trial gave fuel to the new global labor movement, and it inspired the creation of International Workers' Day on May Day of 1889, meshing with the European spring festivals held on May 1.<br>
Leaders of other countries would've <em>loved</em> to kill off May Day. But it was too wrapped up in the old pagan spring celebrations, now starring cheery mobs of laborers singing ancient songs about smashing the system and sawing off the head of the screaming king. After dancing around the maypole and drinking everything in sight, the festively clad young people would tear off their folk costumes and screw each other in the forest, like wood sprites.<br><br>
But every now and then, the revelers would launch a real revolution, which is how we got the Soviet Union and leftists and all that.<br>
Very crafty U.S. holiday planners within the federal government were told by bankers and industrialists to find a way to get rid of this phenomenon. They had watched with interest as the Catholic Church tried (and failed) to steal May Day from workers by renaming it Saint Joseph's Day—the mythological Joseph, the cuckold in the tale of Mary's supernatural pregnancy, was the patron saint of going along with the system even though you're utterly dead inside.<br><br>
For Washington, the answer was to simply have a <em>different</em> kind of May Day—one that was more about sitting in the yard getting drunk, instead of storming the Bastille or seizing the means of production. After U.S. marshals and soldiers slaughtered railroad workers during the 1894 Pullman Strike, the federal government quickly whipped up a national workers' holiday. This "Labor Day," the first Monday in September, was preferable to the May Day agitations that called for worldwide socialist revolutions.<br>
The American authorities re-christened May Day as "Law and Order Day," a deft bit of <em>word magic</em> that knocked the life out of U.S. celebrations of May 1. The commemoration of the Haymarket Massacre itself, on May 4, is now a fake Disney holiday—May the Fourth Be With You celebrates the immense financial success of <em>Star Wars</em> products.<br>
Labor Day worked all right during our brief mid-20th century era of a prosperous middle class and a less desperate working class and a fully marginalized poor with no access to Twitter. But as a salaried job went from the norm to a prize held by the fortunate, the hard-won eight-hour workday became something sadder and stranger.<br>
One of every three workers is now part of the "contingent workforce"—the exact number is conveniently hidden, because "the Labor Department does not regularly collect data about this group." When the Bureau of Labor Statistics stopped counting this contingent workforce in 2005, it was already at 30 percent of all workers. They're temps, contract workers, seasonal workers, and warehouse labor filling boxes for Amazon. They're generally in service, retail, food production and dead-end office jobs: stocking shelves, killing meat animals in a factory, doing telemarketing or data entry, cleaning bathrooms, working security, etc. And they're often <em>deliberately kept from working 40 hours a week</em>, because only then would they be entitled to benefits and legal protections reluctantly granted to full-time employees.<br><br>
The modern Labor Day is one of the major retail sales weekends, right up there with the ominous Black Friday of Walmart riots and the unsatisfied mobs haunting Day After Christmas sales. With 70 percent of retail workers kept as part-timers and low-end retail increasingly being a round-the-clock operation, Labor Day is likely to be just another day of labor for the nation's worst-paid not-quite-employees.<br>
Retail, along with "customer service representatives" and "fast food preparation," is one of the top five "largest job growth" occupations, according to the Labor Department. But don't get used to such horrible jobs, because even these are going away. The burger-flipping robot and the self-service checkout computer are killing off the crappy jobs just as machines killed all the jobs in agriculture and manufacturing.<br><br>
This is the worst part of Labor Day, for those who want to think about it: <em>Nearly all remaining jobs will be eliminated</em>, probably in your own lifetime! The American-led destruction of the labor movement has been remarkably successful, and three decades of aggressive anti-union propaganda has made the few remaining trade unions with their pensions and vacations seem decadent and greedy to people struggling with a shift at the Del Taco followed by a shift at the Walmart, leaving children and elderly parents with whatever member of the casual family is without paid work of any kind.<br><br>
But don't feel smug if you've got a law degree or work for an accounting firm or manage some department selling whatzits. The management massacre of 2008 and 2009 was just a way to get rid of dead-weight white-collar workers. Those jobs will never return. Most everything that anyone does can be done better and more cheaply by computers, and the price of robots is dropping just as the price of mainframes plummeted 20 years ago with the introduction of cheap but powerful PCs.<br>
The next mass movement, if it ever happens, will not be about increasingly scarce <em>laborers, </em>but about <em>people </em>in general. Nationalism, oxycontin, despair, television, alcohol and slob propaganda have all done a very good job of keeping the 80 percent of Americans who are "financially insecure" too worn down and miserable to realize they've got a common enemy. If they ever do figure this out, there will either be a long internal war—the "class war" that worries rich liberals and rich conservatives alike—or the Pentagon is just going to poison the whole country between Silicon Valley and Manhattan.<br>
Enjoy the barbecue.<br>
<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="6"></hr>
Love for Labor Lost
by Paul Krugman | September 1, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/opinion/krugman-love-for-labor-lost.html?hp&pagewanted=print
It wasn’t always about the hot dogs. Originally, believe it or not, Labor Day actually had something to do with showing respect for labor.
Here’s how it happened: In 1894 Pullman workers, facing wage cuts in the wake of a financial crisis, went on strike — and Grover Cleveland deployed 12,000 soldiers to break the union. He succeeded, but using armed force to protect the interests of property was so blatant that even the Gilded Age was shocked. So Congress, in a lame attempt at appeasement, unanimously passed legislation symbolically honoring the nation’s workers.
It’s all hard to imagine now. Not the bit about financial crisis and wage cuts — that’s going on all around us. Not the bit about the state serving the interests of the wealthy — look at who got bailed out, and who didn’t, after our latter-day version of the Panic of 1893. No, what’s unimaginable now is that Congress would unanimously offer even an empty gesture of support for workers’ dignity. For the fact is that many of today’s politicians can’t even bring themselves to fake respect for ordinary working Americans.
Consider, for example, how Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, marked Labor Day last year: with a Twitter post declaring “Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.” Yep, he saw Labor Day as an occasion to honor business owners.
More broadly, consider the ever-widening definition of those whom conservatives consider parasites. Time was when their ire was directed at bums on welfare. But even at the program’s peak, the number of Americans on “welfare” — Aid to Families With Dependent Children — never exceeded about 5 percent of the population. And that program’s far less generous successor, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, reaches less than 2 percent of Americans.
Yet even as the number of Americans on what we used to consider welfare has declined, the number of citizens the right considers “takers” rather than “makers” — people of whom Mitt Romney complained, “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives” — has exploded, to encompass almost half the population. And the great majority of this newly defined army of moochers consists of working families that don’t pay income taxes but do pay payroll taxes (most of the rest are elderly).
How can someone who works for a living be considered the moral equivalent of a bum on welfare? Well, part of the answer is that many people on the right engage in word games: they talk about how someone doesn’t pay income taxes, and hope that their listeners fail to notice the word “income” and forget about all the other taxes lower-income working Americans pay.
But it is also true that modern America, while it has pretty much eliminated traditional welfare, does have other programs designed to help the less well-off — notably the earned-income tax credit, food stamps and Medicaid. The majority of these programs’ beneficiaries are either children, the elderly or working adults — this is true by definition for the tax credit, which only supplements earned income, and turns out in practice to be true of the other programs. So if you consider someone who works hard trying to make ends meet, but also gets some help from the government, a “taker,” you’re going to have contempt for a very large number of American workers and their families.
Oh, and just wait until Obamacare kicks in, and millions more working Americans start receiving subsidies to help them purchase health insurance.
You might ask why we should provide any aid to working Americans — after all, they aren’t completely destitute. But the fact is that economic inequality has soared over the past few decades, and while a handful of people have stratospheric incomes, a far larger number of Americans find that no matter how hard they work, they can’t afford the basics of a middle-class existence — health insurance in particular, but even putting food on the table can be a problem. Saying that they can use some help shouldn’t make us think any less of them, and it certainly shouldn’t reduce the respect we grant to anyone who works hard and plays by the rules.
But obviously that’s not the way everyone sees it. In particular, there are evidently a lot of wealthy people in America who consider anyone who isn’t wealthy a loser — an attitude that has clearly gotten stronger as the gap between the 1 percent and everyone else has widened. And such people have a lot of friends in Washington.
So, this time around will we be hearing anything from Mr. Cantor and his colleagues suggesting that they actually do respect people who work for a living? Maybe. But the one thing we’ll know for sure is that they don’t mean it.
<hr noshade color="#0000ff" size="6"></hr>
The oligarchs plan for America is to have as many people as possible
scrambling for survival as you see in the video below.
<hr noshade color="#0000FF" size="6"></hr>
<img src="http://70.38.64.76/h/1/186e7385-f6cb-4a1b-a269-43c13fad3016.jpg" width="500">
Labor Day Is a Scam To Keep You Poor and Miserable Forever
by Ken Layne | September 1, 2013
http://gawker.com/labor-day-is-a-scam-to-keep-you-poor-and-miserable-fore-1218081585
Labor Day is a <em>complete rip-off</em>. Labor isn't celebrated at all—instead, a single day's <em>break</em> from labor is celebrated. You might think this is a stupid thing to care about, because Labor Day is really just about getting drunk in your yard, again. But that's actually evidence of this very successful con job pulled on you, the American worker (or unemployed person, or discouraged worker, or "grad student"
. You probably don't even <em>believe </em>in Labor Day.<br>America, as you've surely been told, is a very special country. One example of the superiority of the United States is that it managed to deport the global workers holiday called May Day. This was especially skillful because May Day began not in Russia or Finland or Middle Earth, but in Chicago, a major American city built specifically to exploit the labor of poor immigrants.<br><br>
On May 4 of 1886, police opened fire on laborers demanding an eight-hour workday. The cops had been sent over by their bosses at the slaughterhouses and City Hall to break up the rally and smash skulls. The chance to open fire on the workers conveniently arrived when a crude bomb was tossed toward the coppers by persons unknown; eight local anarchists were rounded up and convicted—four of them were slowly strangled in an intentionally botched public hanging, while a fifth condemned man blew off a significant portion of his own head by chewing on a blasting cap he'd smuggled into prison.<br>
The phony trial gave fuel to the new global labor movement, and it inspired the creation of International Workers' Day on May Day of 1889, meshing with the European spring festivals held on May 1.<br>
Leaders of other countries would've <em>loved</em> to kill off May Day. But it was too wrapped up in the old pagan spring celebrations, now starring cheery mobs of laborers singing ancient songs about smashing the system and sawing off the head of the screaming king. After dancing around the maypole and drinking everything in sight, the festively clad young people would tear off their folk costumes and screw each other in the forest, like wood sprites.<br><br>
But every now and then, the revelers would launch a real revolution, which is how we got the Soviet Union and leftists and all that.<br>
Very crafty U.S. holiday planners within the federal government were told by bankers and industrialists to find a way to get rid of this phenomenon. They had watched with interest as the Catholic Church tried (and failed) to steal May Day from workers by renaming it Saint Joseph's Day—the mythological Joseph, the cuckold in the tale of Mary's supernatural pregnancy, was the patron saint of going along with the system even though you're utterly dead inside.<br><br>
For Washington, the answer was to simply have a <em>different</em> kind of May Day—one that was more about sitting in the yard getting drunk, instead of storming the Bastille or seizing the means of production. After U.S. marshals and soldiers slaughtered railroad workers during the 1894 Pullman Strike, the federal government quickly whipped up a national workers' holiday. This "Labor Day," the first Monday in September, was preferable to the May Day agitations that called for worldwide socialist revolutions.<br>
The American authorities re-christened May Day as "Law and Order Day," a deft bit of <em>word magic</em> that knocked the life out of U.S. celebrations of May 1. The commemoration of the Haymarket Massacre itself, on May 4, is now a fake Disney holiday—May the Fourth Be With You celebrates the immense financial success of <em>Star Wars</em> products.<br>
Labor Day worked all right during our brief mid-20th century era of a prosperous middle class and a less desperate working class and a fully marginalized poor with no access to Twitter. But as a salaried job went from the norm to a prize held by the fortunate, the hard-won eight-hour workday became something sadder and stranger.<br>
One of every three workers is now part of the "contingent workforce"—the exact number is conveniently hidden, because "the Labor Department does not regularly collect data about this group." When the Bureau of Labor Statistics stopped counting this contingent workforce in 2005, it was already at 30 percent of all workers. They're temps, contract workers, seasonal workers, and warehouse labor filling boxes for Amazon. They're generally in service, retail, food production and dead-end office jobs: stocking shelves, killing meat animals in a factory, doing telemarketing or data entry, cleaning bathrooms, working security, etc. And they're often <em>deliberately kept from working 40 hours a week</em>, because only then would they be entitled to benefits and legal protections reluctantly granted to full-time employees.<br><br>
The modern Labor Day is one of the major retail sales weekends, right up there with the ominous Black Friday of Walmart riots and the unsatisfied mobs haunting Day After Christmas sales. With 70 percent of retail workers kept as part-timers and low-end retail increasingly being a round-the-clock operation, Labor Day is likely to be just another day of labor for the nation's worst-paid not-quite-employees.<br>
Retail, along with "customer service representatives" and "fast food preparation," is one of the top five "largest job growth" occupations, according to the Labor Department. But don't get used to such horrible jobs, because even these are going away. The burger-flipping robot and the self-service checkout computer are killing off the crappy jobs just as machines killed all the jobs in agriculture and manufacturing.<br><br>
This is the worst part of Labor Day, for those who want to think about it: <em>Nearly all remaining jobs will be eliminated</em>, probably in your own lifetime! The American-led destruction of the labor movement has been remarkably successful, and three decades of aggressive anti-union propaganda has made the few remaining trade unions with their pensions and vacations seem decadent and greedy to people struggling with a shift at the Del Taco followed by a shift at the Walmart, leaving children and elderly parents with whatever member of the casual family is without paid work of any kind.<br><br>
But don't feel smug if you've got a law degree or work for an accounting firm or manage some department selling whatzits. The management massacre of 2008 and 2009 was just a way to get rid of dead-weight white-collar workers. Those jobs will never return. Most everything that anyone does can be done better and more cheaply by computers, and the price of robots is dropping just as the price of mainframes plummeted 20 years ago with the introduction of cheap but powerful PCs.<br>
The next mass movement, if it ever happens, will not be about increasingly scarce <em>laborers, </em>but about <em>people </em>in general. Nationalism, oxycontin, despair, television, alcohol and slob propaganda have all done a very good job of keeping the 80 percent of Americans who are "financially insecure" too worn down and miserable to realize they've got a common enemy. If they ever do figure this out, there will either be a long internal war—the "class war" that worries rich liberals and rich conservatives alike—or the Pentagon is just going to poison the whole country between Silicon Valley and Manhattan.<br>
Enjoy the barbecue.<br>
<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="6"></hr>
Love for Labor Lost
by Paul Krugman | September 1, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/opinion/krugman-love-for-labor-lost.html?hp&pagewanted=print
It wasn’t always about the hot dogs. Originally, believe it or not, Labor Day actually had something to do with showing respect for labor.
Here’s how it happened: In 1894 Pullman workers, facing wage cuts in the wake of a financial crisis, went on strike — and Grover Cleveland deployed 12,000 soldiers to break the union. He succeeded, but using armed force to protect the interests of property was so blatant that even the Gilded Age was shocked. So Congress, in a lame attempt at appeasement, unanimously passed legislation symbolically honoring the nation’s workers.
It’s all hard to imagine now. Not the bit about financial crisis and wage cuts — that’s going on all around us. Not the bit about the state serving the interests of the wealthy — look at who got bailed out, and who didn’t, after our latter-day version of the Panic of 1893. No, what’s unimaginable now is that Congress would unanimously offer even an empty gesture of support for workers’ dignity. For the fact is that many of today’s politicians can’t even bring themselves to fake respect for ordinary working Americans.
Consider, for example, how Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, marked Labor Day last year: with a Twitter post declaring “Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.” Yep, he saw Labor Day as an occasion to honor business owners.
More broadly, consider the ever-widening definition of those whom conservatives consider parasites. Time was when their ire was directed at bums on welfare. But even at the program’s peak, the number of Americans on “welfare” — Aid to Families With Dependent Children — never exceeded about 5 percent of the population. And that program’s far less generous successor, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, reaches less than 2 percent of Americans.
Yet even as the number of Americans on what we used to consider welfare has declined, the number of citizens the right considers “takers” rather than “makers” — people of whom Mitt Romney complained, “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives” — has exploded, to encompass almost half the population. And the great majority of this newly defined army of moochers consists of working families that don’t pay income taxes but do pay payroll taxes (most of the rest are elderly).
How can someone who works for a living be considered the moral equivalent of a bum on welfare? Well, part of the answer is that many people on the right engage in word games: they talk about how someone doesn’t pay income taxes, and hope that their listeners fail to notice the word “income” and forget about all the other taxes lower-income working Americans pay.
But it is also true that modern America, while it has pretty much eliminated traditional welfare, does have other programs designed to help the less well-off — notably the earned-income tax credit, food stamps and Medicaid. The majority of these programs’ beneficiaries are either children, the elderly or working adults — this is true by definition for the tax credit, which only supplements earned income, and turns out in practice to be true of the other programs. So if you consider someone who works hard trying to make ends meet, but also gets some help from the government, a “taker,” you’re going to have contempt for a very large number of American workers and their families.
Oh, and just wait until Obamacare kicks in, and millions more working Americans start receiving subsidies to help them purchase health insurance.
You might ask why we should provide any aid to working Americans — after all, they aren’t completely destitute. But the fact is that economic inequality has soared over the past few decades, and while a handful of people have stratospheric incomes, a far larger number of Americans find that no matter how hard they work, they can’t afford the basics of a middle-class existence — health insurance in particular, but even putting food on the table can be a problem. Saying that they can use some help shouldn’t make us think any less of them, and it certainly shouldn’t reduce the respect we grant to anyone who works hard and plays by the rules.
But obviously that’s not the way everyone sees it. In particular, there are evidently a lot of wealthy people in America who consider anyone who isn’t wealthy a loser — an attitude that has clearly gotten stronger as the gap between the 1 percent and everyone else has widened. And such people have a lot of friends in Washington.
So, this time around will we be hearing anything from Mr. Cantor and his colleagues suggesting that they actually do respect people who work for a living? Maybe. But the one thing we’ll know for sure is that they don’t mean it.
<hr noshade color="#0000ff" size="6"></hr>
The oligarchs plan for America is to have as many people as possible
scrambling for survival as you see in the video below.
<hr noshade color="#0000FF" size="6"></hr>
<img src="http://70.38.64.76/h/1/186e7385-f6cb-4a1b-a269-43c13fad3016.jpg" width="500">