min and earnie mostly move in tandem

always worth a regraphing : path of labor share

future shop steward

i beat off to this center fold every nite

"Previously, it was thought that only humans had the ability to dance......" .....enter snow ball

"....dancing to his favorite song - the Backstreet Boys' ' Everybody ' "
             
" played at three different tempos."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7IZmRnAo6s
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8027379.stm

"Frame-by-frame analysis revealed
snowball is  able to keep time as the beat changes "

notice
 and all done   with  a giddy  panache

two years worth of washington wageling wing clips

Walmart Hialeah : a spark ?

Workers at a Walmart in Hialeah Gardens, Fla.,

STIGGY on the 40% off slide line of the male blue wage " given us the blues"

 "men who graduated from high school but don’t have four-year college degrees make almost 40 percent less than they did four decades ago."

5 fuckin ways fuckin worse is fuckin better

" 1. Income Redistribution Is Worse Than Usually Reported
We are told that the richest 1% doubled its share of income in the past thirty years. But from 1980 to 2006, according to both IRS and CBO figures, they nearly TRIPLED their share of income -- and that's after-tax income.
After 2006, the recession set everyone back temporarily, but in the first two years of the recovery, the richest 1% captured an incomprehensible 121% of the income gains (others saw debt rise faster than income).

2. Wealth Redistribution Is Even Worse Than Income Redistribution
In 1983 the poorest 47% of America owned about 2.5 percent of the nation's wealth, an average of $15,000 per family.
In 2009 the poorest 47% of America owned ZERO percent of the nation's wealth (their debt exceeded their assets).
Hard to believe it could get even worse. But because of the housing crisis and recession, the median family net worth dropped 40% between 2007 and 2010, while the richest Americans were regaining all their losses, and beginning an even steeper climb to the top.
Perhaps the biggest reason for this wealth redistribution is that the richest 10% own almost 90 percent of stocks excluding pensions. Since the recession, as the U.S. economy has "recovered," almost two-thirds of the gain was due to growth in the stock market.

3. The Redistribution of Productivity: Boosting Profits Rather Than Wages
From 2001 to 2011, total corporate profits more than doubled, to almost $2 trillion, while the corporate federal income tax rate was cut in half.
Incomes for 99% of Americans have declined since the recession, with the median household income dropping by 7.3 percent. Low-income jobs ($7.69 to $13.83 per hour) made up 1/5 of the jobs lost to the recession, but accounted for 3/5 of the jobs regained during the recovery.

4. Finance is Outrunning Society, and Taking the Money With Them
Americans once trusted the financial industry to safeguard their retirement money. But high tech has transformed high finance, at a much faster rate than the average investor can understand the changes.
Rolling Stone reports on the loss of $2.3 billion in pension money in Maine -- and the simultaneous billing of $2.1 billion by the hedge funds, private-equity funds and venture-capital funds. Another report tells of local funding crises caused by indecipherable "structured finance" deals sold by bankers with promises of big returns. In 2007 a hedge fund manager (John Paulson) made $3.7 billion by conspiring with Goldman Sachs to create packages of risky subprime mortgages, so that in anticipation of a housing crash he could use other people's money to bet against his personally designed sure-to-fail financial instruments.
The high-speed high-tech chicanery continues in the stock market, where programs can intercept 'buy' orders and in a few nanoseconds purchase the stock and then complete the 'buy' order for a few pennies more.
The bankers and hedgers and hustlers have made up new rules for making money, and our government representatives don't know what's going on, or don't care, or don't want to stop the financial games that ultimately generate campaign funds. Finance is quickly printing its own new money. In less than ten years, the world's wealth has approximately doubled, from $113 trillion to $223 trillion. Much of that is sheer speculation: the derivatives industry is worth over $1 quadrillion. But those speculative transactions get cashed in as real money.
It's a dizzying high-speed fantasyland that redistributes the real money of the middle class to the super-rich while inventing new forms of fees and bonuses along the way.

5. Redistribution Through Government Manipulation
There are numerous ways the very rich have cajoled and coerced and connived their Congressional partners to redistribute money in their direction. Like the lower capital gains rate. An astonishing 75 percent of dividend and capital gain subsidies go to the richest 1%. That's still not enough for hedge fund managers, who call their income "carried interest" instead of "income" to keep their tax rate at the capital gains rate. And even this small amount may not be paid. Hedge fund managers with incomes in the billions can pay ZERO income tax by deferring their profits through their companies indefinitely.
About two-thirds of nearly $1 trillion in individual "tax expenditures" (tax subsidies from special deductions, exemptions, exclusions, credits, capital gains, and loopholes) goes to the top quintile of taxpayers.
Banks have arranged to get lower interest rates, saving them $83 billion per year.
The U.S. federal government spends $100 billion a year on corporate welfare, almost half for big agriculture and the fossil fuel industry.
Another $150 billion per year goes for excessive pharmaceutical expenditures, as the drug companies have lobbied for laws to keep cheaper medications out of the hands of Americans.

Better to Call It Pre-Distribution
The term 'pre-distribution' better represents, according to political scientist Jacob Hacker, "the way in which the market distributes its rewards in the first place." Unregulated free-market capitalism simply makes the rich richer. Even if they have to break the backs of productive middle-class Americans to get their way."

"while the number of jobless workers has been falling, the number of jobless workers who receive no UI benefits has been rising and is higher now than at the bottom of the recession in 2009"

jackie C

sudden bill

self serving horse apples by wind easterly

income by creed group

job markets suck

complete:

It appears prett

which ones not like the others ?

recent journey of median income : a quarter century going no where

"In 1989, the median American household made
 $51,681 in current dollars
 (the 2012 number ... was $51,017). "

" 24 years ago, a middle class American family was making more
       than the a middle class family was making one year ago."

LIVING A FULD LIFE

Richard Fuld, former CEO of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

• Fuld earned about $69.5 million in 2007, the year before Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in Sept. 2008. From 2000 to 2007, he was awarded about $889.5 million and cashed out about $529 million of that before the company went bankrupt.
• He owns homes in Greenwich, Connecticut, Jupiter Island, Florida, and a ranch in Sun Valley, Idaho.
• Fuld has since started a consulting firm called Matrix Advisors LLC.

example : uniscaling sucks if comparative changes in rates are not comparable e/p rates change verey slowly ...profits very fast below notice the hidden P/E shift it tells a larger tale then these other fire works displays

the no income tax clingers

labor day update lost decade for wagelings

"according to every major data source, the vast majority of U.S. workers—including white-collar and blue-collar workers and those with and without a college degree—have endured more than a decade of wage stagnation."


" Wage growth has significantly underperformed productivity growth regardless of occupation, gender, race/ethnicity, or education level."

" During the Great Recession and its aftermath (i.e., between 2007 and 2012), wages fell for the entire bottom 70 percent of the wage distribution, despite productivity growth of 7.7 percent."


" Weak wage growth predates the Great Recession.
 Between 2000 and 2007, the median worker saw wage growth of just 2.6 percent, despite productivity growth of 16.0 percent, while the 20th percentile worker saw wage growth of just 1.0 percent and the 80th percentile worker saw wage growth of just 4.6 percent."

" between 2000 and 2012, wages were flat or declined for the entire bottom 60 percent of the wage distribution (despite productivity growing by nearly 25 percent over this period)."


" Wage growth in the very early part of the 2000–2012 period, between 2000 and 2002, was still being bolstered by momentum from the strong wage growth of the late 1990s"

". Between 2002 and 2012, wages were stagnant or declined for the entire bottom 70 percent of the wage distribution."

" a lost decade  where real wages were either flat or in decline. "

This lost decade for wages comes on the heels of decades of inadequate wage growth. For virtually the entire period since 1979 (with the one exception being the strong wage growth of the late 1990s), wage growth for most workers has been weak.

"The median worker saw an increase of just 5.0 percent between 1979 and 2012,
 despite productivity growth of 74.5 percent—while the 20th percentile worker
 saw wage erosion of 0.4 percent and the 80th percentile worker saw wage growth
 of  17.5 percent."

health cost increases moderate ?

"The 4 percent increase in 2013, for example, still more than doubles growth in inflation (1.1 percent) and wage growth (1.8 percent) over the same time period.

 While monthly premiums are growing slower, the Kaiser Family Foundation data  shows a steady rise in deductibles, the amount that an insurance costumer must pay out-of-pocket before their benefits kick in.

This is especially true among businesses with fewer than 200 employees, where 58 percent of workers are enrolled in plans with a deductible over $1,000, up from 49 percent in 2012.  At companies of all sizes, the number of workers in high deductible plans has more than tripled since 2006.

 

 

occ distribution change

gotta love measure D

http://economichardship.org/the-offline-wage-wars-of-silicon-valley/
.
" the push for Measure D — the San Jose ballot initiative that would mandate the city’s 70,000 minimum wage workers to get a 25 percent raise from $8 to $10 an hour, the single largest minimum-wage jump in the nation’s history. "

.

"This legislative fight was hatched in a perfect storm. It was happening post-recession, in the wake of open global panic about the economy. It was happening during mind-boggling tuition hikes — SJSU has raised its tuition by 141 percent since California’s last minimum wage increase in 2008. It was happening when gas prices often surpassed $4 a gallon. "


"The campaign kicked off just as thousands of angry Americans, many of them young, descended on Wall Street and hundreds of satellite cities, including San Jose."

.
"The San Jose campaign came at the heels of minimum wage battles being fought across the country, from New York to New Mexico to the congressional floor."


" Democrats in the Senate had, by this time, introduced and repeatedly called for the passage of the Fair Minimum Wage Act, which would raise the federal minimum to $10.10."


 " San Jose, ..the funneling of creative, educated young people and venture capital dollars to a city, which in turn gives birth to a service industry to support this class
, is both the modern emblem of urban success and a recipe for a cavernous wealth gap."


"San Jose has long been a tech mainstay that other start-up-friendly cities across the country, like Omaha and Atlanta, hope to emulate. But could it also be a model for young, urban activists fueled by the very inequality their city’s wealth has created?"

.

8 dimensions of union culture cultivation

" Develop your culture carefully. A culture that values success only risks moral drift and struggles to adapt when it faces losses and reversals. A culture that values only purity of ideology is ill-equipped to take advantage of opportunities as they present themselves. A dynamic tension between these two extremes must be maintained if labor is to remain both relevant and principled." "    Solidarity is non-negotiable. An attack on any union has to be considered as an attack on all unions and must be reacted to as such. The two most recently successful organizing drives in North Carolina were carried over the line by other unionists showing solidarity with Farm Labor Organizing Committee and UFCW and holding the line on boycotts. Additional actions that unions can do to show solidarity with other workers engaged in labor struggles include contributing to the strike funds of fellow unionists, turning up to protests organized by other unions, and engaging in joint community awareness campaigns to let neighbors know why supporting the union is also supporting themselves." "    No permanent allies, no permanent enemies. With politicians and special interest groups, our engagement with them must remain wholly dependent on whether they provide adequate support to our cause. For instance, a state senator doing labor a solid ten years ago is no reason to support him now if he is pushing policies that are actively damaging to the lives of working people. Likewise, if the executive director of an environmental group that your local has been at loggerheads with for years approaches with an idea for a joint project that would be beneficial to the members and to working folks, work with her. This collaboration could mean a new way forward for both groups and the chance to build power and put pressure on elected officials." "    Right-to-work doesn't prevent union organizing; it prevents shitty union organizing. The labor movement should always be engaged in an effort to repeal right-to-work laws at the state level, and the effects that those laws have on unions and organizing have long been documented elsewhere. But until that happens, the struggle for worker justice must continue to be fought, even where it seems to be the most difficult or intransigent. To that end, visibility is an absolute necessity, as there are people in Southern states who think that they can't form unions because of right-to-work. Taking the time and energy to demystify the jargon and give a worker the information she needs to make an informed decision is, in a word, organizing. As an example, there are UAW-organized plants in North Carolina with membership levels rivaling those of plants in Michigan, and even in the explicitly open-shop federal government, where the union has to provide support to non-members, the American Federation of Government Employees' locals representing the Bureau of Prisons have very high rates of organization. How these two very different unions manage this feat is similar: they are very proactive at getting new hires on-board the first day. When it comes down to it, servicing your members and showing people that there is power in a union can go a long way towards increasing union density, no matter where you reside." "    Cultivate member-to-member relationships as much as possible and across multiple unions. Isolation is corrosive to solidarity within a union and with other unions. As such, labor must work to create a network of people who will have each other's back in the face of corporatist aggression, such as layoffs or bargaining in bad faith. The central instrument for creating these networks should be central labor councils, which are federations of labor unions within a certain geographical area who typically have their meetings in one central location. This makes them the perfect place for events that will build solidarity across various trades, and not just the kind of events that are directly related to the work that goes on there. Social events like concerts and barbecues can build the kind of social ties necessary to form such a network. All workers benefit when the House of Labor has a strong foundation; using the central labor councils to build these connections between workers is a great way to do just that." "    Labor has to work for the broader interests of working people. An isolation from the community makes it much easier for our enemies to vilify the union and attack it using the political process. There is no better example of this than Wisconsin, where labor was isolated from the community and an ultimately successful campaign was waged against public sector collective bargaining by hardline right wing politicians. When labor works in the broader interests of the working public, it serves as a force multiplier. There is no better example of this than Chicago, where the Chicago Teachers Union has successfully changed the conversation about education in the city through a careful and deliberate strategy of community outreach combined with on-the-job action. In the end, what's good for the broader community is good for labor, and working towards that can bring people who would otherwise be skeptical of organizing around." "    Success breeds success. When starting out from very little or nothing in the way of density, your power and your options are limited, so even minor successes can be used to build power and bring more people into the fight. Simply winning grievances and arbitration decisions can bolster a contract and make it more ironclad for the next round of negotiations. When you do the all of the little things that make a union run cohesively, it can pay off in a big way for workers on the shop floor. As we mentioned above, this can be particularly useful in states that bar union security clauses from employment contracts". "  If an action does not build power, you must seriously question whether or not to do it. This is a key to building union strength anywhere that union density is low, but especially in the South. When you get right down to it, unions are about power for working people. There are a lot of other things that get attached to them, but that is their original and main purpose: to serve as a defense against the exploitative characteristics of corporate power. No matter how noble the action or good the cause, if it does not build power, you must think critically about whether it is necessary and whether those resources can dedicated to another project that does build power." . .

burm and loot ...the mew monastic succubus ...universities

"The phrase “corporatization of the university” captures the reorientation of colleges
 away from a primarily educational mission
and toward one that resembles the financial bottom line. "

"The evidence of this shift is myriad:
 the growth of for-profit degree-granting institutions,
rising tuition and student debt,
 the pursuit of elevated rankings,
 disproportionate resources spent on athletic programs and sports facilities,
 the identification of students as “customers,”
 assessment of accomplishment in the classroom as that which can be quantified,
 a small number of highly compensated academic “superstars,”
and
a swelling cadre of overpaid administrators

success for colleges is measured by
 continuous new construction on campuses and substantial endowments.

 The achievement of this never-ending growth requires constantly greater revenue, which in turn, necessitates escalating tuition and fees.

Comparatively little of this money, however,
 is dedicated to supporting the educational mandate of colleges

 reducing the teacher-to-student ratio
 paying the majority of faculty a livable salary.
 Rather
 the burden of these “business-like” endeavors
has been borne on the backs of onerously indebted students
 and low-wage temporary faculty.

Most teachers in higher education across the country
 lack long-term job stability.

 Presently, close to 70 percent of all faculty appointments
 in degree-granting institutions are off the tenure-track
 a number that includes over one million people.

 The label “contingent academic labor” encompasses an array of arrangements,
 adjuncts paid on a per-course basis,
 one- or multi-year contract faculty,
visiting professors, and post-docs.

 In general, these positions are characterized by
 low pay,
no-to-little job security,
 and, frequently,
 no health or retirement benefits.


 , the national average remuneration for adjuncts is $2,987 for a 15-week, three-credit course

. Currently, nearly 34,000 Ph.D. recipients receive food stamps to supplement their earnings.

 In an effort to cobble together a living, many adjuncts teach at multiple institutions,
 taking on a course load of six or more classes per semester and spending significant time traveling among campuses.

 Most recently,
 numerous university systems have reduced the number of courses adjuncts can teach
 in a single year
to avoid the thirty-hour per week threshold established by the 2010 Affordable Care Act
 that would trigger access to employer healthcare benefits.

. In 1970, almost 78 percent of faculty were classified as permanent, full-time.

 While four decades ago most adjuncts derived their main source of income from other full-time employment and taught an occasional course in their field of expertise,

 today more and more non-permanent faculty grind to support themselves and their families through teaching.


In addition to the financial hardships associated with contingency come the indignities of subservient status within the academy, as most adjuncts are not considered “full” members of their department. They are generally ineligible to apply for university funds to support professional development, conference travel, or research activities, often have no assigned office space, and are rarely given the opportunity to create specialized courses. Moreover, despite regularly teaching the largest number of students in a department, as well as their majority status on campus, they have either a minimal or no voice in faculty governance.
Contingent faculty constitute an academic proletariat, where a lack of workplace control, negligible job security, and prevailing low wages define the conditions of employment. As more students than ever attend institutions of higher learning and the corresponding demand for teachers grows, temporary professors comprise an abundant supply of qualified labor seeking too few decently paid, permanent jobs.
In response to these conditions, previously solitary academic laborers are joining together in an attempt to speak with a collective voice. Despite the logistical obstacles to organizing a scattered and temporary workforce, and unresolved questions about the legality of union membership for various categories of contract faculty (a result of the 1980 Supreme Court ruling in National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University), unionization campaigns have taken hold from Washington State to Washington, D.C., from Colorado to Ohio, and from California to Massachusetts, in private and public colleges, as well as in for-profit institutions. New associations have formed to advocate on behalf of adjunct and other temporary college teachers, among them the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor and the New Faculty Majority. COCAL has forged alliances with contingent workers across national borders and occupations, while NFM has conducted research, including a 2012 report “Who is Professor ‘Staff’ and How Can This Person Teach So Many Classes?,” and launched educational and outreach efforts to raise awareness about the links between faculty working conditions and student learning conditions.
Recently, the major teacher unions—the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association—have ramped up their commitment to organizing adjuncts, while the Service Employees International Union, following successful campaigns in the Washington, D.C. region, has expanded its work among nonpermanent faculty nationally. Following the “metro-organizing strategy,” SEIU seeks to unionize the majority of adjuncts in a given metropolitan area in order to secure greater bargaining leverage, with a long term goal of securing equal pay for equal work, thus eliminating the financial incentive for employing contingent labor. While the implementation will vary according to locality, elements may include the negotiation of a shared contract for a given region, establishment of a hiring hall that would also offer workspace for members and opportunities for professional development, and additional programs and resources to alleviate the isolation often felt by adjuncts. In this manner, the success of the metro-organizing plan depends on strengthening the relationship between the union and its members, thus imagining it as not merely a bargaining agent, but as an institution that embraces and fulfills a social need in the community.
As contingent faculty endeavor to improve their working conditions and pay, students have become important allies. For, while the majority of university teachers struggle to earn a living, tuition rates and student indebtedness continue to soar, a circumstance that belies administrative claims that improved salaries for adjunct faculty require increased tuition. Rather than accede to such divide-and-conquer tactics, students have begun to ask how their tuition dollars are being spent, if not to pay their teachers a livable wage, and have demanded more input in university governance, where boards of trustees are largely comprised of representatives of the banking and financial industries.
In the United States, student debt now totals over one billion dollars, exceeding that of credit cards. By 2012, the average student loan debt had reached $27,000, and well over 60 percent of students attending college are expected to secure a loan to pay for their education (the number approaches 96 percent for those enrolled in private, for-profit schools). And, under current regulations student loan and consumer debt differ in regard to the lack of protections afforded debtors and the greater collection powers granted creditors. Personal bankruptcy offers no relief from the obligation of student loans and creditors can garnish not only wages, but also tax returns, Social Security payments, and disability income. Beyond this, there is a lucrative business in defaulted student loans. In this case, 20 percent of all payments can be appropriated by the creditor for processing costs before any money is applied to the loan principal or interest, and borrowers are compelled to participate in “loan rehabilitation” programs that involve significant fees and that extend the length of payments and, hence, increase the overall debt. Guaranty agencies derive approximately 60 percent of their income from fees alone. Among those subject to these predatory practices, it is worth noting, are many adjuncts who carry the burden of substantial student debt.

---

Beyond the detrimental effects these developments have on those seeking to earn a living wage as college teachers and on students weighed down by loans, this growing reliance on contingent faculty raises crucial questions about the nature of education. The traditional value of a liberal arts education rests not on a transactional arrangement dedicated to specific job training or the memorization of information, but on being taught methods for interpreting the meaning of that information to foster a community of critical thinkers. This requires a working and learning environment that supports engagement with the complexity and plurality of ideas and one that provides for spontaneous and sustained interactions between teachers and students. But this model of education is undermined when the majority of faculty occupy precarious and low-wage jobs, lack adequate time and resources to respond fully to student needs, and whose uncertain employment precludes the development of long-term relationships with students or colleagues. And it is additionally compromised by the expanded influence of administrators and a corporate-like preoccupation with revenue, enrollment numbers, facility construction, and suspect national rankings.
Though often cloaked with the mantle of financial stress, the desire for a flexible pool of academic workers echoes the efforts of Frederick Winslow Taylor in the early 20th century, in the name of efficiency, to diminish workers’ power in pursuit of greater managerial control. Contingency creates not only a less costly, but a more compliant workforce. Faculty governance loses meaning when the majority of faculty is excluded from its prerogatives and when it consists mostly of responding to administrative directives. In these respects trends in the academy mirror those of the general labor market, where the number of temporary workers across professions is on the rise.
But while sharing a great deal with other contingent workers, academic labor is distinct in important ways and with particular political implications: tenure and academic freedom.
Designed to protect intellectual diversity, tenure promotes a freedom of inquiry that requires abandoning attachments to an inviolate set of ideas and that often rewards challenges to conventional wisdom. This makes education an inherently political act and, further, because of its tendency to question received truths, one that encourages progressive thought. Following the successful efforts in the mid-twentieth century to solidify the protections of tenure, and with it academic freedom, universities have fostered the exploration of ideas essential to the political left, most influentially in the realm of multiculturalism. This connection between a more egalitarian politics and a liberal arts education that disrupts the status quo animates the continued assault by conservative forces against higher education, one manifested in reduced public funding for universities, a business-like insistence on quantifiable outcomes, and greater numbers of contingent faculty.
It is broadly acknowledged that the substantial influence of neoliberal advocates on national politics stems from their ability to frame public and policy debates about domestic, economic, and foreign affairs through the establishment of think tanks and affiliation with academic departments, a political effort being shouldered by irregularly employed, low-paid teachers and indebted students. Ideas matter, and a majority of temporary academic workers jeopardizes tenure, academic freedom, and the intrinsically progressive methods associated with open intellectual exploration, thus narrowing a crucial intellectual space in which the political left can develop more compelling and alternative visions of the future than those offered by an established corporate-infused perspective.

---

A shared economic precariousness links contingent faculty and students. For the vast majority of people affiliated with them, universities no longer provide a pathway to the middle-class, but instead perpetuate continual fiscal anxiety and give rise to a class defined by its financial insecurity. And this economic uncertainty shapes political behavior. A robust American tradition couples economic stability with independent politics. A view that dates back to Thomas Jefferson’s ward republics, the nineteenth century free labor movement, and the student activism of the 1960s, its proponents contend that economic dependence limits one’s ability to freely engage in politics. Indeed, a lack of monetary independence leads to political timidity. Academic freedom itself is grounded in the notion that meaningful scholarly exploration requires autonomy from financial reprisal by donors, administrators, or others.
Historically, a more egalitarian politics has often emerged from improved material abundance, not from cumulative deprivation. A fundamental political question in the United States centers on the distribution of the nation’s enormous and growing wealth: either dispersed in the hands of the many or aggrandized in the hands of the few. In the late-nineteenth century, as the country transitioned to a staggeringly productive industrial economy American Federation of Labor co-founder Samuel Gompers answered “more” when asked what workers wanted. His response effectively summarized the persistent demand for higher wages as that which would establish the economic security necessary for organized labor to wield greater political influence, and joined calls for a minimum wage and guaranteed employment.
Six decades later, amid the sustained economic and social benefits of the “New Deal Order” that successfully coupled business, labor, and the state to create and stabilize a broad middle-class, the authors of the 1962 Port Huron Statement, which marked the founding of Students for a Democratic Society, acknowledged the relationship between their financial security and their developing political outlook: “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” Here, a generation of college students critically assessed social arrangements—from civil rights and military adventurism to questioning the reach of corporate influence—with an assurance that they possessed the power to challenge them without jeopardizing their own economic status. Today, however, financial uncertainty defines the circumstances of most college students and faculty.
The monetary insecurity that typifies the working conditions for contingent faculty shapes their choices both inside and outside of the classroom. Anxiety about contract renewal affects the substance of teaching. Adjuncts may make classes less demanding to mitigate low student evaluations, self-censor to avoid contentious topics, or choose not to assign controversial readings to head-off potential complaints. Such decisions subvert precisely that which academic freedom and tenure are meant to safeguard—the advancement of analytical and questioning scholarship that is passed along to students in order to nurture an analytical and questioning citizenry. As well, contingent status affects faculty behavior outside of the classroom, which also constitutes part of a student’s education. Economically vulnerable teachers are less likely to oppose administrative policies or to support student organizations involved in political actions on campus, and may be reluctant to publicly aid unionization efforts for either themselves or other university workers for fear of retribution.
While financial precariousness for the majority of faculty is embedded in their status as an academic proletariat, for students the costs of a college education are producing a generation bound from their early twenties to decades of debt and who then embark on a post-graduation work life where real wages are stagnant, where temporary employment is becoming less exceptional, and for whom the achievement of economic solvency seems unlikely. The circumstances of contingent faculty and indebted students are simultaneously emblematic of national trends toward precarious employment and long term financial anxiety amid enormous national wealth, and more deeply implicated because of the power of education to act as an egalitarian social force."

but for social security 4/5ths of a nation...ill prepared to retire

motor city job sprawl

" Detroit today  holds the dubious distinction of having the greatest "job sprawl,""


" 77 percent of available jobs are  more than 10 miles beyond the city's core."

" only 20,000 manufacturing jobs remain in a city of 700,000"

" unemployment rate among black men stands at nearly 50 percent - the highest in the nation."

the fall of Detroit "by the time the keys to Detroit were handed to the Black leadership, Detroit was beyond rescue "

" Flush with cash from World War II and anticipating a huge growth in demand for their products, Ford, General Motors and Chrysler abandoned Detroit's multi-story plants abandoned in favor of new sprawling horizontal campuses on former farmland in the Detroit suburbs and in Ohio, Indiana and Canada. Between 1947 and 1958, the Big Three built 25 new factories.
"

" None of them were in Detroit."

". In less than two decades, from 1947 to 1967, Detroit lost 128,000 jobs in the auto industry alone."

the unions goosed by barrycare

"When the Obama administration announced July 2 that it would give a breather to employers affected by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), angry unionists noticed a pattern. Even before this delay, “every corporate interest that’s asked for regulatory relief has gotten it,” said Mark Dudzic, chair of the Labor Campaign for Single Payer, “but the concerns of union plans have been overridden.” The requirement that employers provide health insurance or pay a fine will be postponed till January 2015 or later. “Looks like ordinary workers will be forced to pay for health insurance on the original schedule [starting January 2014], while big business is off the hook for at least a year,” said Chris Townsend, political director of the United Electrical Workers (UE). Justifying the delay, the Obama administration cited employers’ difficulties in reporting employee hours worked, pay, and their insurance offerings—all information needed to calculate whether a fine is due for not offering adequate insurance. The Walmart Loophole Some states are trying to patch up problems with Obamacare before it hits. California union groups are campaigning to eliminate the “Walmart loophole,” so called because it affects many employees working for the low-wage retail king. Under the ACA, employers who don’t provide affordable insurance (defined as premiums no higher than 9.5 percent of your income for individual coverage) will be fined $2,000 per full-time worker if their employees have to go to the health insurance exchanges as a result. It’s the basic pay-or-play idea: All employers with 50 or more full-time workers should put in something, either by covering their workers or by paying a fine. (It’s this fine that has now been delayed.) But what if the employees, like many Walmart workers, are making so little they’re eligible for Medicaid? No similar fine applies. Likewise, some employers are cutting hours to evade the “full-time” worker part of the law, which defines full-time as more than 30 hours a week or 130 a month. The union-supported legislation would penalize big California employers (those with more than 500 employees) if their workers enroll in Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program. The fine is pro-rated by the number of hours worked, so employers can’t evade it by cutting workers’ hours. The fine money would go to Medi-Cal, and there are penalties for employers who discourage workers from enrolling. The delay won’t be cheap. It means the government will forego $10 billion in employer payments for 2014, according to the Congressional Budget Office. ROUND AND ROUND Meanwhile, unions have been asking for adjustments that would protect multi-employer health care funds, but getting nowhere. As a result, even supportive unions such as the Food and Commercial Workers have started to freak out about the law. UFCW, UNITE HERE, and the Teamsters have gone round and round with the administration about their multi-employer “Taft-Hartley” plans, which provide insurance to 20 million workers, including part-timers, retirees, and workers between jobs, in the construction trades, trucking, hotels, and grocery. In a strongly worded letter to Democratic congressional leaders, the presidents of the three unions let fly: “Time is running out: Congress wrote this law; we voted for you. We have a problem; you need to fix it,” they wrote. “Our persuasive arguments have been disregarded and met with a stone wall by the White House and the pertinent agencies. “Even though non-profit plans like ours won’t receive the same subsidies as for-profit plans, they’ll be taxed to pay for those subsidies,” the union leaders wrote. “Taken together, these restrictions will make non-profit plans like ours unsustainable.” Under Obamacare, small employers could save money by pulling out of their Taft-Hartley plans and sending workers to the new “exchanges” to get a subsidy, said James McGee, director of the Transit Employees Health & Welfare Fund in Washington, D.C. As it stands, “employers will have every incentive to get out of the funds when union contracts expire.” Employers with under 50 workers, which include 93 percent of construction employers, don’t have to pay a penalty for not providing coverage. (See more on Taft-Hartley plans in accompanying box.) INTENDED CONSEQUENCES Part of the reasoning behind Obamacare was to lower overall medical costs by forcing people to pay more for their care—causing them to visit the doctor less often. “The consumer should continue to expect that their plan is going to be more expensive, and they will have less benefits,” said a consultant quoted in the New York Times. That part is working. Employers are now seeing the ACA standards as a floor, and trimming back their plans to match the minimum. The school system in Old Rochester, Massachusetts, went even further. The board demanded that the non-teaching staff such as cafeteria workers, represented by the UE, pay 50 percent of their premiums. Family coverage would have cost 80 percent of their income. What’s Happening To The Taft-Hartley Plans? The looming changes are already affecting grocery workers. In a contract negotiated this spring, 30,000 Stop & Shop workers in five locals in the Northeast gave up on keeping part-timers with less than 30 hours in the union’s Taft-Hartley plan. Ratified in March, the contract instead gives a “benefit bonus” to workers who must seek insurance on the exchanges, and a contribution to a pre-tax Health Savings Account. It also provides that Stop & Shop management can’t cut hours to evade federal health insurance requirements. Under the ACA, employers pay a fine if they don’t offer insurance to full-time workers, defined as 30 hours a week or more. This has led some employers, especially restaurants and retailers, to toy with cutting back employee hours as a way to avoid the fines. One problem with putting some workers into the exchanges, said Mark Dudzic of the Labor Campaign for Single Payer, is that everyone will be in a different boat, even within the union. “Instead of having a solidarity-based health care system, where everybody’s in, it’s individualized… it all depends on your situation,” he said. A single mother with three dependents would be fully subsidized on the exchange, whereas working next to her, a married worker with no children might pay a big premium. “Some will be better off, some will be worse off, some will get lost in the mix,” Dudzic said. For a detailed explanation of problems for Taft-Hartley plans, see the recent white paper issued by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. The now-delayed ACA provision says insurance premiums may cost no more than 9.5 percent of a worker’s income. That’s for an individual, though; there’s no limit on the cost of family coverage. Many workers will face a Catch-22: insurance they can’t afford, but no access to Obamacare’s subsidies because their employer offers health insurance that the law deems affordable. Because of union pressure, Old Rochester management backed off, but workers will still be left paying 30 percent of their premiums by 2016. The Wendy’s hamburger chain noted that a majority of its low-paid workers already decline the high-deductible plan the company offers at $2.50 a week—so managers expect that when they start offering a better, Obamacare-approved plan at $25 a week, employees still won’t take it. Popeye’s and Chipotle have made similar calculations. In 2014, workers who opt out of such employer-offered insurance, and have no other insurance, will be hit with a fine of $95 annually and increasing in subsequent years. Many employers will figure it’s cheaper to stop offering insurance, anyway. The annual fine to the employer per worker will be just $2,000—assuming the fines eventually kick in. Workers so stranded by their employers can buy insurance on the soon-to-be launched insurance “exchanges,” now officially called “Health Insurance Marketplaces.” There, on a state-run website (or one run by the feds if your state opts out), private plans that meet ACA standards will be listed, with out-of-pocket limits (deductibles and co-pays) of $6,350 for an individual and $12,700 for a family. These approved plans may impose no caps on annual or lifetime benefits. Pre-existing conditions and gender can’t be considered, but premium prices may vary (within limits) based on smoking, age, the size of your family, and the area you live in. Anyone can buy insurance from a company on the exchange. For workers whose jobs don’t provide “affordable” insurance, the government will subsidize the cost of buying private insurance for individuals or families making less than 400 percent of the poverty level—$45,960 for an individual and $94,200 for a four-person family in 2013. The subsidies are intended to keep a family’s insurance premiums from growing beyond 9.5 percent of its income. EXCUSES, EXCUSES Some employers are blaming Obamacare for cuts they wanted to implement anyway. One favorite area of blame is the so-called Cadillac tax, which doesn’t kick in until 2018. The tax is scheduled to hit plans that have premiums above $10,200 a year for individuals or $27,500 for families—employers would be taxed 40 percent of any amount over those limits. The Private Option Dozens of state legislatures have refused Obamacare money intended to expand Medicaid, the program that covers many low-wage and unemployed workers. To get states on board, the administration has been wheeling and dealing, with alarming results. The most extreme case is Arkansas. The administration is apparently allowing Walmart’s home state to entirely privatize Medicaid (final approval is expected in August). Instead of Medicaid, the state would pay premiums for eligible residents (those earning up to 138 percent of the poverty level) to get private insurance. They would be limited to the “silver,” or third-best, plans on the new insurance exchange. It’s not clear how people who are broke to begin with will manage the annual out-of-pocket limits allowed on the exchanges, $6,350 for an individual and $12,700 for a family. Since the “private option” funnels more public money into private insurance coffers, and dismantles Medicaid, the Arkansas plan is likely to attract copycats in other states. While employers complained they couldn’t get ready to report on their insurance plans by 2014—and thus got a delay—they’re four-and-a-half years ahead of the game in planning for the Cadillac tax (see box below article). Their solution is to dump more costs onto workers by offering lower-premium, higher-deductible plans. More than a third of covered U.S. workers are now in plans with deductibles of $1,000 or more, and 14 percent have deductibles above $2,000. At Cummins, an engine manufacturer based in Indiana, deductibles reach as high as $6,000. The lower premiums comply with the Obamacare requirement that less than 9.5 percent of your income go to premiums. But the law doesn’t take into account how much you spend on deductibles and co-pays in employer-provided insurance, creating pressure to get less care. Of course, that incentive inverts what all experts say is the healthier—and cheaper—way to structure medical care. That is to encourage lots of preventive visits, to maintain health and avoid emergencies. When people neglect routine care because the co-pay is unaffordable—or because the insurance company pays nothing at all till the giant deductible is reached—small problems become big ones, costing more in the end. To cope with high-deductible plans, AFSCME members in Vermont have negotiated “choice cards,” funded by their employers, which pay their deductibles and co-pays out of an employer fund, said Traven Leyshon, secretary-treasurer of the Vermont AFL-CIO. Another Obamacare rule that lowers the floor is that employer plans must pay at least 60 percent of the cost of covered benefits, a figure that would make most union negotiators nauseous. But that’s still called “affordable” insurance. This spring, the administration ruled that employers would have to obey the same annual out-of-pocket maximums as the exchanges, $6,350 for an individual and $12,700 for a family. FALLING FORWARD? Advocates of Medicare for All say the faults of the ACA can make the case for a system that’s truly “everybody in, nobody out.” The Electrical Workers (IBEW) passed a resolution for “single-payer” at their last convention, and the San Francisco building trades now support single-payer. “I’ve never heard so many building trades folks talk about single payer,” said the UE’s Peter Knowlton. The paperwork and headaches required to set up Obamacare leave some yearning for a simpler solution, like the set percentage deducted from our paychecks every pay period for Medicare. Increase that, and start Medicare at age zero, say advocates—as the Rube Goldberg system developed by the ACA clunks and lurches forward. In Vermont, where the legislature passed a bill guaranteeing health care as a human right in 2011, advocates are trying to steer the committees designing the program away from involving private insurance, and toward a purely public system like those used in so many countries. Under Obamacare, though, they can’t get a waiver to institute any new system until 2017. ‘Cadillac Tax’ a Pretext to Cut Benefits Life got a lot worse for Abbey Bruce and her husband Casey, who has cystic fibrosis, on January 1. That’s when her employer, Providence St. Peter Hospital, changed its health plan. The co-pay for the enzymes Casey takes to digest food used to be $50 per month. Now it’s $300. His nebulizer solution went up, too. By July, they owed Providence’s pharmacy $2,000. “I expect there to be a co-pay. I’m not crazy,” said Abbey, a certified nursing assistant who makes $15 an hour. “But it used to be in a proportion that didn’t make health care out of reach for us.” On top of the co-pays, the Bruces’ annual deductible before insurance kicks in is now $3,000—almost 10 percent of the median income for a member of her union at St. Pete’s. The out-of-pocket max is $6,000. A “wellness” component of the new plan allows workers to get a once-a-year screening, in return for a cash payout that doesn’t come close to covering the cost increase. Abbey, who was studying to become a nurse, had to drop out of school. She’s taken on two extra jobs, in-home elder care and cleaning houses, on top of her hospital work. Human Resources urged employees to bring their concerns about the new plan, so Abbey went. The H.R. manager’s solution? “She told me I could clean her house if I needed to, for extra money,” Abbey told Labor Notes. TIMES GETS IT WRONG The New York Times highlighted the Bruces’ story May 28 and suggested we should blame “the so-called Cadillac tax” when employers replace decent insurance with high-deductible plans. But the Times is mistaken. Abbey’s union, Service Employees 1199NW, did the math. The plan Providence cancelled wouldn’t have come close to qualifying for the Cadillac tax—and in any case, the tax won’t even kick in until 2018. The tax is a convenient pretext, providing public cover for employers already eager to switch to cheaper and worse coverage. Providence isn’t even trying to use the “Cadillac tax” excuse with employees—it just says the new plan is great and any problems are rumors. Employees aren’t buying it. They struck over this issue for five days in March and filed unfair labor practice charges over the unilateral change. The health plan is a central issue in contract negotiations. Abbey and Casey Bruce aren’t the only Providence employees suffering. “We have people skipping meds,” Abbey said. “People alternating with their spouse: ‘You take meds this month, I’ll take next month.’” A pregnant co-worker is worried how she’ll afford to deliver her baby. “That’s the part that makes me so mad,” said Abbey. “We’re caregivers: we care about each other, too.” "

—Alexandra Bradbury - See more at: http://www.labornotes.org/2013/08/obamacare-opens-business-shuts-out-labor#sthash.qnAWIAwr.dpuf

attack angle: walmart destroys jobs

"when a Walmart store opens each Walmart worker replaces  about 1.4 retail worker"

", when Walmart comes to town, it doesn’t “create” anything. All it does is put mom-and-pop stores out of business"

if its effective use it

but  recall the counter

" you're  fighting productivity gains
  gains that   mean higher value added per hour
the basis for higher wage rates"

ya ya ya

the basis for higher wages
 or higher profits or lower prices
or any combo of the three ... in fact

but we don't have guaranteed full employment policies
so jobs are always more or less scarce

any productivity booster is most likely a net job killer
=====================================\

"Walmart’s using the  phony "we create  jobs" argument
in its fight to block a living wage law in Washington, D.C"

ya the facts are on net  Walmarts kill jobs in a community
and lower wages over all

conventional wise guy ism

"In the face of a steadily declining labor movement,
 unions are increasingly battling one another,
devoting resources to gaining members from rivals
 rather than focusing on the 88.2% of the workforce
                     that is not unionized"

bull twitter

can see this graph too often

optimal path MNC pov

system goes postal on itself...the serial massacres at the postal service

http://www.washingtonpost.com/r/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2011/08/11/National-Politics/Graphics/WhitePaperRIF.pdf

"We recognize that asking Congress to eliminate the layoff protections in our collective bargaining agreements is an extraordinary request by the Postal Service, and we do not make this request lightly".

bobby R on three motivations for the present snail paced kapshow gig

the center aisle party " patrons "

"want unemployment to remain high and job-growth to sputter. "




"First

" high unemployment keeps wages down.
 Workers who are worried about losing their jobs settle for whatever they can get — which is why hourly earnings keep dropping. The median wage is now 4 percent lower than it was at the start of the recovery. Low wages help boost corporate profits, thereby keeping the regressives’ corporate sponsors happy."

one problem why is this not allows the case


===============================
Second

" high unemployment fuels the bull market on Wall Street.
 the Fed is committed to buying long-term bonds
as long as unemployment remains high.

 This keeps bond yields low and pushes investors into equities
which helps boosts executive pay and Wall Street commissions,
 thereby keeping regressives’ financial sponsors happy."

that jury rig
rings but one bell
the one on the roof of ding dong school


Third


"high unemployment keeps most Americans economically fearful and financially insecure.
 This sets them up to believe regressive lies — that their biggest worry should be that “big government" will tax away the little they have and give it to “undeserving" minorities;
 that they should support low taxes on corporations and wealthy “job creators;"
 and that new immigrants threaten their jobs."

a few gaps in this syllogism

just an 8 million job gap here in AMERIKA ?

 EPI’s Heidi Schhroom  writes,
“At this rate  (175k per month), it would take six years to fill our gap of
                                                 8.3 million jobs
                                                        and return to a healthy labor market.”

i'd say "healthy" for us jobsters would require closing the full job gap

now 20 million souls wide

wage push inflation is a feature not a bug of tightening job markets

a wage boom contrived by macronautic job market tightening

though using transfer payments is fast its not furious

use
state announce  intentions
---"setting off a wage boom"---

goals

------ give number paths ----


example institutionalization// formalization

the NIRA

score one for little adenoids ......5 up ...but .....5 down.... the second 5 has a bigger base ...so give or take a proper fraction

epi on wage structure dynamics -5 /-3/+3

“The bottom 20 percent of American workers by income
—28 million workers—
earn less than $9.89 an hour"

" $20,570 a year for a full-time employee"

". Their income fell 5 percent"


" between 2006 and 2012."

" Wages for workers at the 50th percentile
—their median pay is $16.30 an hour—


" their wage income fell  3.4 percent"



" pay for the top 10 percent rose 3 percent.”

-5 /-3/+3

waltons strike back

"too many politicians from both major parties are failing to stand up for the American worker. Who's left?............. Unions."

 

that's "we'll have to see" ...lee
there


"both parties?"  both !!!!?????

afscme's   highest   chip
turning  on the blue dogs and new dems ?

 then comes the meat

a drum roll  for pri sec big box low wage job unionization

 

why ?

 

the pub sec fish can only swim for long

 in a highly  pri sec organized lake :

 

 

"Once again, the facts speak for themselves: Unions are the first and last line of defense for America's workers."

 

"According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, growth in union workers' average hourly pay and total benefits far outpaced those of non-union members in the first quarter of 2013."

 

 

"In fact, wages and salaries of union-represented workers grew 4.3 percent in the first quarter of 2013, while those of non-union employees rose 0.8 percent."

 

extrapolation please ?

 

 

prior facts trail ?

 

"

 

"According to CAP, one of the keys to boosting a stagnant middle class is making it easier for workers to form labor unions."

 

 

"the big corporations  have played with marked cards."

,

" the non-union retail giant Wal-Mart (with $443 billion in net sales in 2012, the largest private employer in the United States) "has in recent months been only hiring temporary workers."

 

 

Wal-Mart U.S. Chief Executive William Simon, " hours flex by the needs of the business from time to time,"

 

"an unstable temporary workforce could  cushion corporations  from a potential rise in health care costs next year."

 

 

 

.

.

.

"the six heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune hold as much wealth as the entire bottom 30 percent of all Americans. "



"The facts speak for themselves: Unions are more necessary, not less, than ever before."

 

 

Lee A. Saunders is the president of the American, Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

teachers and the chopping block NY style ..two strikes and your out

 tested and measured
by  your own personal student charges'
  state wide test results

scoring


1) highly effective

 2)  effective



3) developing



 4)  ineffective........  boing !

"an 'ineffective' rating on the tests trumps the other measures. ... 'Teachers rated ineffective on the tests have to be rated ineffective overall. Even a glowing teacher with great rapport with her students, if the test scores don't rise at the predetermined level, that teacher has to be rated ineffective"

'
get that two years running
you're out !

what quintile did you reach

" measure of upward mobility"

" the probability of children born in the bottom quintile making it into the top quintile"

and the probability of a child born in the top quintile making it into the bottom quintile ?

downward mobility


how about born in the the top centile  dropping to the bottom ...er decile ?

gotta love that rat mankiw for promotting this shit heel

Mark J. Perry
Dr. Mark J. Perry is a full professor of economics at the Flint campus of The University of Michigan, where he has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in economics and finance since 1996. Starting in the fall of 2009, Perry has also held a joint appointment as a scholar at The American Enterprise Institute.
read more >

"Somewhere, Karl Marx is stroking his beard, and nodding: See, I told you so!" ......bull shit ..he as always is madly trying to comprehend more deeply all this contradictory innovation

training one time per career becomes n times so maybe we get more training if not higher training

training time during a career may become larger
as  task buckets change ever more rapidly

so maybe that is what all this more ed is about
the gut sez
the career  iterations of  new "know what/ now how " acquisition stages
    is a function of the existing  job type scrap rate

okay I dig

but at least two of your four college years trains you in  what .....?

if task training requirements are part of a total cost reduction they should get shorter and less demanding

and time training in a career must be made maximally cost effective

gauntlet simplifying ?

seems the ace mohgol believes supply produces its own demand ...in human capital markets

"Daron Acemoglu believes as automation accelerates
 we will have to invest far greater sums in education and job training programs"

higher ed is dead

 "Martin Ford advocates a long-term policy proposal that he describes as “essentially a guaranteed minimum income,” with built-in incentives that reward educational attainment."
I love that
the reward for education use to be.......well ....beyond the fact
education is supposed to be  its own reward
 err like a round of golf


till tomorrow
education's   reward en mass  was /still is  ..higher job pay

implicit in this quote:
mass education will have zero market value
soooo
higher e is dead

"The mid century middle class, more or less, was made possible by the Industrial Revolution" it just took a hundred years

"sally make a note i like this tidbit "

" In the U.S., more than 1.1 million secretaries vanished from the job market between 2000 and 2010, their job security shattered by software that lets bosses field calls themselves and arrange their own meetings and trips Over the same period, the number of telephone operators plunged by 64 percent, word processors and typists by 63 percent, travel agents by 46 percent and bookkeepers by 26 percent, according to Labor Department statistics"


   now notes like the headline go into smart phones maybe named sally or..Justin or ...

bivens on the great split : PRODUCTIVITY FROM COMPENSATION

So what should you note? Well, the average wages of those below the 90^th percentile have greatly lagged productivity. Ok, these are those low-skill people identified by the Heritage report, I guess. But look at wage-growth for those workers between the 90^th to 95^th percentiles—workers that earn more than at least 90 percent of the workforce. Surely there are some competent people in this group, no? After all, more than 10 percent of the U.S. workforce now has an advanced degree—some of them must be showing up here. And yet wage-growth cumulatively lags productivity growth by more than 30 percentage points for this group between 1979 and 2011.
It’s also worth noting that nearly two-thirds of the total cumulative wage-growth for this group of presumably highly-skilled workers can be accounted for by just five of the thirty-two years under discussion—the tight labor markets between 1997 and 2001 that lifted wages across the board. In short, for most of the past generation, the U.S. economy has been terrible at delivering wage growth even for half the workers above the 90^th percentile. Skills shortage? Really?
So where does this leave us? Yes, average compensation growth has been close (not equal to, but close) to productivity growth over the past generation. In fact, since 2000 there has been a large divergence between productivity and average compensation. But compensation for not just typical workers, but for the vast majority of workers, has badly lagged productivity over this period. And it is awfully unconvincing to hang this on the interpretation that it’s just about their allegedly poor skills.
And, of course, it’s always worth noting the one group (see the figure below) that has been able to see wage-gains far in excess of productivity growth, and which kept the overall average wage-growth from lagging too far behind productivity growth.

1. Just as one example, Heritage assumes that the gap between compensation and productivity caused by difference in the price deflators used to calculate productivity of firms and used to calculate inflation-adjusted compensation should be seen simply as evidence that consumer price inflation is overstated. There’s an equally compelling interpretation (pdf) that this is instead evidence that we’re overstating the productivity of firms that can be translated into consumption growth, and hence that the last generation has been characterized not just by growing inequality, but by even worse overall economic performance than is commonly thought.

2. To make sure the interpretation is clear—the wages of the 90^th-95^th percentiles rose 36% cumulatively over this whole period, if this group saw non-wage compensation rise at the average rate, this means that their compensation growth rose eight percent faster, or, 39 percent over the period.

- See more at: http://www.epi.org/blog/compensationproductivity-link-broken-vast/#sthash.6DR90Qzo.dpuf

Visa mcshits on ronalds army

the Atlantic's assigned  snide-ster notes:
"As Jim Cook at Irregular Times notes, the $1,105 figure up top is roughly what the average McDonald's cashier earning $7.72 an hour would take home each month after payroll taxes, if they worked 40 hours a week. So this budget applies to someone just about working two full-time jobs at normal fast-food pay....A few of the other ridiculous conceits here: This hypothetical worker doesn't pay a heating bill. I guess some utilities are included in their $600 a month rent? (At the end of 2012, average rent in the U.S. was $1,048). Gas and groceries are bundled into $27 a day spending money. And this individual apparently has access to $20 a month healthcare. McDonald's, for its part, charges employees $12.58 a week for the company's most basic health plan. Well, that's if they've been with the company for a year. Otherwise, it's $14. "

job halls

the alt labor movement needs to build
 multi purpose non denominational ***job class meeting places


use union local halls church halls school halls college halls
get space and get started

spread the word.... help the self organizing.... spark the struggle


*** all union pooled funds no one union or a few or a federation  of unions gets  high lighted

real and nominal wages during big D blue nominal green real red inflation

recent wage phillips curve and recessions

 "the basic relationship between wage growth and labor market slack breaks down
 during and after recessions."


" In each of the three recession most recent recessions
 wage growth slows much less than expected as the unemployment gap increases.
but then  Wage growth  continued to slow
long after the unemployment gap began  to normalize "

two phases.


"The first is the recessionary period, when the unemployment rate runs up, pushing up the unemployment gap. During this phase, wage growth declines less than its usual relationship with the unemployment gap would indicate."

" The second phase is the recovery. As the unemployment rate starts to decline during the labor market recovery, wage growth continues to decline. Consequently, during the early part of recoveries, labor market slack and wage growth move down together in a positive relationship, rather than the negative relationship that characterizes the average wage Phillips curve."

" The result is that recessions generate clockwise loops in the wage Phillips curve.
 These loops coincide with periods when the fraction of workers with no wage changes rises sharply"

percent of wagelings reporting no wage change over prior year

another view





note the  dispersion of change around zero
comparing 06 to 11

exchanges in butt fuck status

"The state-by-state health insurance exchanges, which launch Oct. 1, 2013, are the linchpin of Obamacare’s plan to cover the uninsured. The exchanges will benefit a minority of low-wage union members who don’t currently have employer-provided health insurance. But they may harm many other union members who are covered through union-affiliated multi-employer health trusts — which are prevalent in construction and in low-wage industries like grocery and janitorial.
The harm would come chiefly because union members and their employers won’t have access to individual subsidies, or to small-employer tax credits, for insurance purchased on the exchanges. But their nonunion competitors will."

more free training.... less tuitoned schooling

the direct costs of training to the trainee should be zero ..once they pass the tests
their obligation to repay costs should vanish

youth employment v frogs ...our good ? in some ways

we have way way too many" round college " student prince and princess  types

but the french !!!!

and older ?

problematic question
must look at each weed patch up close


jobs oughta be there for everyone
everywhere all  the time ...

15 to 105
smart and healthy
dumb and sickly
two days search...a suitable employment at a suitable wage and set of hours

wew need higher participation and lower median hours

Fight voucherization ...but....organize the chartered shops too

the best defense ...................

"The Strengthening Social Security Act of 2013 (S. 567)"

 raise the monthly Social Security benefit by about $65

measure inflation not with the chained CPI (a benefit cut),
but using a more accurate measure of inflation for seniors (the CPI-E).

The CPI-E would increase COLAs.

 eliminate the Social Security tax cap

 Under this bill, Social Security would be able to pay out full benefits to the year 2049.

bombard the NLRB

recently walmart job hodrs got the boot for "self organizing "activity

a recent write up:

"While we are confident that the National Labor Relations Board will find Walmart’s actions illegal,......

 we cannot wait on a long legal process to respond."



   time to crank up the bombardment
no waiting on a decision
demand swift action


find the closest NLRB office and go raise hell there !!!!