tagged w/ Unemployment
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Isn't this just the best image of the Rich/Poor Class War in US?
twitpic.com/6mk84mIsn't this just the best image of the Rich/Poor Class War in US?... more
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LOrion
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8 months ago
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The focus of this column is not, however, the American Jobs Act. It’s not President Obama or Washington or politics. It’s about that erosion of the compact between American workers and those who employ them, and where we go from here.The focus of this column is not, however, the American Jobs Act. It’s not... more
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What might be the future job scene in America? Well, if it keeps the current path of sending our jobs overseas, according to this video, we could wind up only with "jobs that no one in China would do."What might be the future job scene in America? Well, if it keeps the current path of... more
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In the past year, as our budget deficit has been a major focus of our governmental leaders, many of the current social programs that our country has been providing have come under attack. Even programs that have nothing to do with our federal budget are being branded as “welfare”In the past year, as our budget deficit has been a major focus of our governmental... more
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"Suicide rates rose sharply in Europe between 2007 and 2009 as the financial crisis drove unemployment up, with Greece and Ireland worst affected.""Suicide rates rose sharply in Europe between 2007 and 2009 as the financial... more
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With one of the most anticipated speeches of his presidency in the rear-view mirror, President Obama now faces what Republicans already have signaled will be an uphill battle getting his jobs plan passed.
Obama outlined the $450 billion plan's mix of tax cuts, tax credits, infrastructure investments and other measures in his speech Thursday night to Congress, urging lawmakers repeatedly to pass it "right away" to help put millions of Americans back to work.
But House Speaker John Boehner offered little more endorsement than that it "merited consideration," while a top Senate Republican, echoing others in his party, dismissed it as more of Obama's "tired agenda."
At stake is an economy sputtering along with an unemployment rate persistently above 9 percent and at risk of falling back into recession.
House Speaker John Boehner said "We hope he gives serious consideration to our ideas as well. It's my hope that we can work together to end the uncertainty facing families and small businesses, and create a better environment for long-term economic growth and private-sector job creation."
Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, said Obama's plan offered more of the same.
"Faced with the reality of historic unemployment rates and record federal debt, I had hoped that President Obama, by now, would understand that even more government spending doesn't create jobs," he said. "Rather than offer a new roadmap for recovery and reform, he merely dusted off a tired agenda of old ideas wrapped in freshly partisan rhetoric."
The biggest element in Obama's plan calls for increasing and extending a cut in the payroll tax from workers that goes to Social Security, while providing the tax cut to employers, too. For workers, the tax that has been cut from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent for this year would fall to 3.1 percent under Obama's plan -- a $175 billion cost. The tax will go back up to 6.2 percent without congressional action by the end of the year.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/09/08/obama-to-lay-out-450-billion-jobs-plan-in-prime-time-speech/#ixzz1XTHUkOkOWith one of the most anticipated speeches of his presidency in the rear-view mirror,... more
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If you look in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, under the word bitter, you will find some definitions for the word as follows:
distasteful or distressing to the mind : galling
accompanied by severe pain or suffering
expressive of severe pain, grief, or regretIf you look in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, under the word bitter, you will... more
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The Empire has no clothes. It has been revealed. Having unilaterally withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia, the US is leading NATO to build a ring of missiles round Russia in Europe. It is globalizing its military forces and operations. An armada of missile-laden NATO war ships is deployed in oceans around the world with nearly 1,000 US military bases on every continent on the planet. Working in this expanded military capacity, NATO members and their allies are encircling China in the Pacific, just as we are surrounding Russia, while rejecting Russia and China’s repeated proposals to negotiate a ban on weapons in space. NATO is a lawless rogue alliance, determined to control the world’s oil and other scarce resources, by brute force. http://www.makeahistory.com/index.php/recent-news/43004-time-to-disband-natoThe Empire has no clothes. It has been revealed. Having unilaterally withdrawn from... more
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worrg
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9 months ago
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New York -- If America is going to solve its unemployment crisis, the nation needs to invent new professions. So says the head of one of the world’s top career placement firms.
Samuel P. Vickers, CEO of Placement Professionals, Inc., told a crowded press conference today that unemployment is high because most of the existing jobs are already filled. “And all those factory jobs that we shipped overseas are gone forever.”
“The only solution is to dream up completely new professions,” he said. “That opens brand-new avenues of opportunity for people looking for work.”
Vickers’ new book, “Invent Your Job. Invent Yourself,” contains literally dozens of examples and possibilities. Each new job is developed by identifying a problem, then building a solution in the form of a career.
“For instance, the Catholic Church is suffering from a severe shortage of priests,” Vickers said. “What if we created a service that outsourced nondenominational clergy? You don’t have to be a believer to be a good priest or minister. You just have to know how to follow a prayer book and reference the Bible. Miracles are optional.”
The professional reward is a new black Buick every three years and an everlasting career, as long as you can keep your hands off the altar boys, according to Vickers.
“Plus you have people bowing to you, genuflecting and asking you for advice. Make them do three Our Fathers and four Hail Marys, and they will be indebted to you for life. That’s what I call a cushy job.”
The legalization of medical marijuana by a growing number of states could also be the source of a new profession. “I call it the marijuana majordomo,” Vickers said.
“The job involves doing all the paperwork and handling all the hassles of getting a person certified for medical marijuana.” And once that’s done, the marijuana majordomo acts as a purveyor of the medicinal material, suggesting blends, refining smoking techniques and providing advice on pot paraphernalia.”
Major changes in the US space program have opened up an alternative way of getting high and getting paid — cosmic travel agent.
“The end of the shuttle program means American astronauts need to book rides on Soviet capsules to get to the space station,” Vickers observed. “At $50 million a seat, someone is going to make a really nice commission on these flights, and it might as well be you.”
http://www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.cfm?headline=s2i99794New York -- If America is going to solve its unemployment crisis, the nation needs to... more
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News is hard, as any beauty contestant will tell you. Fortunately, our crack Super Frat news team is even lazier than you. Here now are the headlines, rewritten for your enjoyment.News is hard, as any beauty contestant will tell you. Fortunately, our crack Super... more
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CNN...
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The Blood and Sweat Behind Labor Day
By Kenneth Davis, Special to CNN
updated 10:56 AM EST, Fri September 2, 2011
PHOTO:
Scores of boys worked at the Breaker Pennsylvania Co. coal mine before child labor was finally outlawed in 1938.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Ken Davis: Today, labor under fire. But war for workers' rights was long, deadly struggle
There was child labor, 12-hour days, 6-day weeks, low wages, no sick days, holidays
Soldiers, militias, private armies used deadly force to break 19th-century strikes
Labor Day born in 1894, he says, but reform didn't come till FDR's fair labor laws
Editor's note: Kenneth C. Davis is the author of "Don't Know Much About History: Anniversary Edition" and "A Nation Rising." His website is www.dontknowmuch.com.
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(CNN) -- A small boy, perched on an open catwalk in a candy factory, falls to his death. No, it is not a macabre moment out of "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." It is a true story told by social reformer Jane Addams, who founded Chicago's Hull House in 1889.
Addams also described little girls who refused sweets as Christmas gifts that year. "They could not bear the sight of it," Addams wrote. "We discovered that that they had worked from 7 in the morning until 9 at night, and they were exhausted."
These Dickensian scenes lasted in America from the late 19th century until 1938, when child labor was outlawed under the Fair Labor Standards Act. They are a sobering reminder of why the nation marks Labor Day.
To most Americans, the first Monday in September means a three-day weekend and the last hurrah of summer, a final outing at the shore before school begins, a family picnic.
But Labor Day was born in a time when work was no picnic. As America was moving from farms to factories in the Industrial Age, there was a long, violent, often-deadly struggle for fundamental workers' rights, a struggle that in many ways was America's "other civil war."
It was a war fought when 12-hour days and six-day weeks were routine. Wages were low; there were no sick days, pensions or holidays. There was certainly no unemployment insurance. Any attempts at organizing were met by the combined wrath of business and government. The business of America was business.
That conflict, a period in which thousands of workers died in America's unsafe and unsanitary factories and mines, and hundreds more died in riots and pitched battles over workers' rights, is the little-noted history behind this holiday.
The first American Labor Day is dated to a parade organized by unions in New York on September 5, 1882, as a celebration of "the strength and spirit of the American worker." Their goals were simple: decent wages, an eight-hour workday and the right to organize. The September date was selected to provide a respite for workers and their families midway between July Fourth and Thanksgiving Day. By all accounts, the first Labor Day was a peaceful affair that drew tens of thousands of workers and their families to the city's Union Square Park.
But the path to a national Labor Day holiday was no walk in the park. The federal Labor Day was created 12 years later, signed into law by President Grover Cleveland during his second term in 1894. It's not that Cleveland was a great friend of labor. In fact, he had just sent out troops to break a strike.
During the economic depression known as the Panic of 1893, workers for the Pullman Car Co., one of the country's largest manufacturers, walked off their jobs when Pullman tried to cut wages, fire workers and evict them from their company-owned homes. They were joined by hundreds of thousands of workers in a nationwide walkout. Facing a strike that would shut down America's railroads, Cleveland dispatched 12,000 federal troops on the premise that the strike interfered with the U.S. Mail. In the ensuing violence, at least 13 strikers were killed.
This was not the first time troops had been used against American workers. Federal soldiers, state militias and private armies, often from the Pinkerton Detective Agency, had used deadly force to break many 19th-century strikes. Some of these strikes had become pitched battles, like the Homestead strike of 1892 in Pennsylvania. There, men on both sides armed with rifles and cannons died fighting over keeping a union at a steel mill, a union that owner Andrew Carnegie and manager Henry Frick were determined to break.
After crushing the Pullman strike, Cleveland thought that granting workers a Labor Day holiday was a sop that would appease them as he sought a third term. (It didn't work; he was denied the Democratic nomination in 1896.) Politicians and labor leaders were content to keep the holiday in September, far from the growing popularity of May Day as a commemoration of the "Martyrs of Haymarket Square," a group of union leaders executed -- unjustly, it was later proved -- after Chicago's deadly Haymarket Square Riots in May 1884.
For unions, Labor Day proved a hollow victory. Most of the reforms they sought did not come about for nearly half a century. The Depression-era fair labor laws that were passed under Franklin D. Roosevelt finally set standards like the eight-hour day and an end to child labor.
This history is worth remembering on Labor Day. But at a moment when American workers are battered by high unemployment, the Great Recession, a technology revolution in the workplace and globalization, there seems to be little to celebrate.
And these economic forces are only part of the relentless pressures faced by America's work force. There is also a renewed war over labor in this country. It is being fought in battleground states including, most notably, Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey and Florida, where mostly Republican governors are wrangling with public employees over pay, pensions and more fundamental issues including the right of collective bargaining.
Their sharp anti-union rhetoric has increasingly found receptive listeners who have been convinced that "spoiled" unions and public employees -- the people who fight our fires, teach our children and pick up our garbage -- are at fault for our budgetary woes and the sorry state of the economy. The fight has been vitriolic but well short of the violence of America's "other civil war."
With that in mind, it is worth recalling President Abraham Lincoln's words during the dark early days of the real Civil War. "Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed," he told Congress in December 1861. "Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration,"
Today, the first Republican president's words would count as heresy in the GOP. But they are a sharp reminder that working men and women built this country and fought its wars. And their labors are worth more than a Monday holiday or the mean-spirited contempt they now face. They deserve, as Lincoln said, "the higher consideration."
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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Kenneth Davis.
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The Blood and Sweat Behind Labor Day
By Kenneth Davis, Special to... more
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The response to Hurricane Irene showed that when the media devote wall-to-wall attention to something, and government officials bring a sense of urgency and ask the public to respond in kind, remarkable things can happen. The question is: why do we reserve this kind of collective action for natural disasters and external attacks? The fact is, we have another crisis that's been hovering over the entire United States for almost three years now and shows no signs of blowing over. The numbers -- including over 25 million unemployed or underemployed Americans -- should be just as scary as the ones that have dominated our national conversation about Irene. With the toll that the job crisis is taking on the lives of millions of people in this country -- from college graduates who can't get jobs to middle class families being thrown out of their homes -- this is a category 5 disaster
http://tinyurl.com/3qt6z3uThe response to Hurricane Irene showed that when the media devote wall-to-wall... more
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LOrion
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added this
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9 months ago
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There's a holiday coming up. It's...it's...30% Off at Penny's Day? Um, how about Toyota Salebration Marathon Day? No, that's not right. Small Business Entrepreneur Day? Damn! That's what happens in July. It's that holiday about working folk. CEO Bonus Week? Unemployment Office Stand-in-Line Day? Nah, ooo, ooo, it's right on the tip of my tongue...Labor Day!There's a holiday coming up. It's...it's...30% Off at Penny's Day?... more
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What do people do after they lose their jobs, other than look for a new one? The unemployed put more time into unpaid household work, including child care, according to an important new study by Mark Aguiar, Erik Hurst and Loukas Karabarbounis. Their findings dramatize the limitations of conventional measures of economic well-being based entirely on market income.
When Benjamin Franklin advised us that “time is money,” he was living a world in which many individuals were self-employed and could at least grow their own food. In our world, it’s hard to convert time into money if you can’t find a paying job.
Still, Americans 15 or older (including students and retirees) devote, on average, almost as much time to unpaid work as they do to paid work (about 23 hours a week on household activities, purchasing goods and services, caring for and helping others, and volunteering, compared with about 25 hours a week on paid work and related activities, according to data from the 2010 American Time Use Survey).
Time applied to unpaid work can provide a partial substitute for consumer expenditures. Individuals can cut down on restaurant spending by preparing their own meals, care for family members rather paying for day care or elder care, clean the house instead of hiring a maid or fix their own roof instead of hiring a roofer.
Shopping may be fun sometimes, but it’s also foraging work in which increased time and effort can save money. In previous research, Professors Aguiar and Hurst have shown that households that shop twice as frequently as others pay prices that are 7 to 10 percent lower.
Retired people seem particularly adept at stretching their budgets. In addition to shopping more carefully, they typically reduce spending on food – a pattern that once led many economists to assume that they had not saved enough for retirement. But Professors Aguiar and Hurst have shown that retirees’ actual food consumption does not decline. Rather, they increase the time devoted to food preparation, cooking more (and presumably better) meals for themselves.
Previous studies of the impact of unemployment on time allocation showed little effect, generating at least one news article about the unemployed “frittering their time away.” Professors Aguiar, Hurst and Karabarbounis provide a very different picture in their recently released paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Time Use During Recessions.”
In a sophisticated econometric analysis of data from the American Time Use Survey, they controlled for underlying trends and also compare differences in time-use across states with differing levels of unemployment. (See this blog post for more details).
They found that about 30 percent of the forgone market work hours during the recession were reallocated to housework and about 5 percent to child care. An additional 10 percent were reallocated to education, health care and civic activities. Time devoted to job searches increased, but remained relatively small, perhaps because there’s not that much people can do when jobs aren’t available........
Continue at:
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/time-money-and-unemployment/?ref=businessWhat do people do after they lose their jobs, other than look for a new one? The... more
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With many people out of work, it was time for WHACKO-TV to find some sponsors that can help people find jobs. Think of it, even Steve Jobs gave up his job, so you have to be pretty crafty to find one these days. What about radio? There are jobs in radio, but you have to be trained to enter the field. That’s where this new video can help you. It is simply called RADIO JOBS and we hope you get one.With many people out of work, it was time for WHACKO-TV to find some sponsors that can... more
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The most basic indicator of the social calamity facing millions of people in the United States is the persistent, and in fact worsening, jobs crisis.
Millions of jobs have been wiped out since the crash of 2008 three years ago. Long-term unemployment remains at highs that far exceed anything since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Some 14 million people in the US are officially unemployed, and an additional 11 million people have given up work or are involuntarily working part-time.
The only reason that the official unemployment rate is not much higher than the current 9.1 percent is because millions of people have given up looking for work or no longer qualify for unemployment benefits. In cities like Detroit, real unemployment is as high as 50 percent.
An entire generation of young people is entering the labor force with no prospect of gaining a decent-paying job. According to the latest Kids Count study, 31 percent of children throughout the country—or 32.1 million children, up 2.9 million from a year before—lived in families where no parent had a full-time, year round job in 2009. This figure is 47 percent for African Americans.
These conditions are set to get much worse. Among a number of bleak economic indicators driving the financial markets down sharply on Thursday was a jump in weekly unemployment claims back above 400,000, a sign of a deteriorating jobs market.......
Continue at:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/aug2011/pers-a19.shtmlThe most basic indicator of the social calamity facing millions of people in the... more
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by JULIE NA, ABC News
Aug. 18, 2011
Thousands of unemployed waited overnight, camping out in their business suits and office heels and braving the tormenting heat in Atlanta to stand in line for a job fair Thursday. Authorities treated 20 people for heat exhaustion as they struggled to keep the line moving and get people moved inside.
The incredible turnout at the job fair comes on the heels of the state labor commissioner's announcement that Georgia's jobless rate rose.
The state unemployment rate increased to 10.1 percent in July from the 9.9 percent in June. The unemployment rate for African-Americans stands at 15.9 percent, far above the national rate of 9.1 percent.
July marks the 48th consecutive month that Georgia has exceeded the national unemployment rate.
The line was full of hopefuls who waited for hours in a line that wrapped around the Atlanta Technical College where the event was held.
The For the People Jobs Initiative, hosted by U.S. Reps. John Lewis and Hank Johnson and sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus, is a series of job fairs and town halls at some of the urban areas hit hardest by unemployment and the financial crisis.
The enormous turnout in Georgia created miles of traffic that clogged southwest Atlanta.by JULIE NA, ABC News
Aug. 18, 2011
Thousands of unemployed waited overnight,... more
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At a Congressional Black Caucus event in Detroit yesterday, California Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters took a few shots at President Barack Obama’s jobs tour for neglecting black communities. Since then the video has gone viral, and both liberals and conservatives have asked tough questions about Obama’s policies.
Rep. Maxine Waters, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, says the group is "getting tired" of making excuses for President Barack Obama.
Waters said Obama is not paying enough attention to the problems of some black Americans — with his three-day bus tour not stopping in black communities.
On Wednesday’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” on MSNBC, “Hardball” host Chris Matthews said it was about time that point was raised, because unemployment in black communities was much higher than the overall unemployment rate.
“You have an unemployment rate in the black community of around 20 percent,” Matthews said. “And that’s a fact. In terms of, certainly, underemployment, it gets up to that level and it’s real. It’s high recession time and nothing’s getting better. And the question you have to ask is, ‘What is the difference between the president’s policy and the Republicans’ policy?’”
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/08/17/matthews-on-congressional-black-caucus-outrage-its-about-time/#ixzz1VK1qCEjTAt a Congressional Black Caucus event in Detroit yesterday, California Democratic Rep.... more
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