May 2013
4 posts
4 tags
“The workers have to pay for and maintain their own trucks, effectively forcing...”
– Sharecropping on Wheels - Working In These Times
I wrote about Savannah’s port truck drivers, who are classified as “independent contractors” by their bosses but don’t get to make their own schedules or control the work that they do. What they DO get is the...
5 tags
“Right now, as we pass over this particular tipping point—or bent moral arc, or...”
– Free to Work, Free to Marry
E.J. Graff has a great piece on ENDA and why it matters, and this point, near the end, is one of the most important ones in it. Remember when Thomas Frank wrote “What’s the Matter with Kansas,” explaining that gay rights and abortion were the wedge...
4 tags
“But there’s another option: Go after the big banks to get back the money the...”
– Unions to Banks: Pay Up
When politicians won’t lead and instead blame public workers for state budget troubles, what do we do?
OK, it doesn’t make a great chant, but it does make an interesting story.
April 2013
5 posts
“The re-election of Mulgrew itself wasn’t surprising. But given that the...”
– New York Didn’t Pull a Chicago, But Dissident Teachers Aren’t Giving Up - Working In These Times
4 tags
“Cha explains to Working in These Times that women who have care-giving...”
– Overworking Women: How Long Hours Lead to Gender-Segregated Jobs - Working In These Times
And a bit of a follow-up.
4 tags
““Not only wages — I am thinking here of the ‘female wage’ and the ‘family wage’...”
– A Day Without Care | Jacobin
Working time, care work, gender, and strikes.
1 tag
“The government does not spend money on a cash benefit program, it just channels...”
– Cash Benefit Programs Are Not Really Government Spending - The Demos Blog - PolicyShop
Matt Breunig demolishes the argument that conservatives opposed to “entitlement” programs are opposed to “government spending.”
6 tags
“Edwin Guzman already lost his job once for union-organizing. But today, he and...”
– The McJobs Strike Back: Will Fast-Food Workers Ever Get a Living Wage? - Sarah Jaffe - The Atlantic
At least three fast food restaurants couldn’t open today because a majority of their workers were out on strike. Minimum wage increase is coming for NY, but the fast food workers aren’t...
March 2013
13 posts
2 tags
“Wal-Mart Stores Inc is considering a radical plan to have store customers...”
– Exclusive: Wal-Mart may get customers to deliver packages to online buyers
No, Walmart, it is not the “sharing economy” when the world’s richest company tries to save money by getting customers to deliver packages for it. It’s just getting around paying minimum wage for...
4 tags
“March 22 saw the first forward movement in some time on New York City’s paid...”
– New York City Council Holds Paid Sick Days Hearing, But Mayoral Hopeful Quinn Barely Shows | RH Reality Check
Oh, and I reported from the paid sick days hearing today, too.
2 tags
“A look at the corporations on the Lean In Foundation’s advisory board also...”
– Sheryl Sandberg is the ultimate good girl careful not to upset those in power | Money | guardian.co.uk
I’ll just be quietly over here whistling “Which side are you on?”
3 tags
“And then there’s the way we talk about the problem, which makes it hard to see...”
– Stay-at-Home Mom Debate: It’s About Work Hours | New Republic
Working time and the mommy wars: guess what, kids, “opting out” is more complicated.
2 tags
“We are pleased to announce that in just a few weeks, Dissent will launch our...”
– Announcing Belabored: A Dissent Podcast Hosted by Josh Eidelson and Sarah Jaffe | Dissent Magazine
So that’s happening. GET ON IT.
3 tags
“So why can’t companies find workers? A 2012 survey by Manpower asked firms why...”
– Murphy’s Law: The World According to Tim Sullivan | Urban Milwaukee
Your weekly reminder that the “skills gap” is still bullshit.
2 tags
“I’m very grateful to both those guys,” said Mr. Coates, who was inked to a blog...”
– Fear of a Black Pundit: Ta-Nehisi Coates raises his voice in American media | Observer
Another of the (male) writers I deeply respect, Ta-Nehisi Coates, on his first big hit and how it came about. And many other things, including why he turned down a New York Times column.
I find the obsession...
3 tags
“Economist Larry Mishel has found that since 1979 low- and middle-income workers...”
– Wealth inequality will keep growing unless workers demand better | Mark Price | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Lean in, ladies! But it won’t actually help you because you already work more than the richest women.
2 tags
“How do you think it feels to be an autoworker right now? And I’ve spent...”
– Welcome to a dying industry, journalism grads - SFGate
Jeremy Scahill’s comments reminded me of this wonderful Barbara Ehrenreich speech. People who inspire me to do what I do, to care about what I care about, to do the work for its own sake and for that of the people I get to talk to every...
2 tags
“Donald Windham’s incredible life story should serve as an inspiration to...”
– YaleNews | Yale awards $1.35 million to nine writers
Jeremy Scahill, one of the people who helped me get my start, someone I’m proud to call a friend, won a $150,000 literary prize from Yale, and managed to make his thank-you a deeply honest statement about journalism as a working-class...
1 tag
Watch(via The Stars (Are Out Tonight) - David Bowie)
So there’s a new Bowie video—another one—and this one is amazing.
1 tag
“Consequently, it is now necessary for advocates of feminism to collectively...”
– bell hooks, “Feminism: A Movement to End Sexist Oppression” in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center.
Equally relevant.
“If improving conditions in the workplace for women had been a central agenda for...”
– bell hooks, “Rethinking the Nature of Work” in Feminist Theory From Margin To Center. Relevant.
February 2013
16 posts
“There was this additional, fraught context that someone didn’t take into...”
– How A Wound Heals - The Rumpus.net
Roxane Gay on being “all laughed out” about sexist, racist humor. Read.
3 tags
“As the figure shows, if the minimum wage had kept pace with average wages—i.e.,...”
– Putting a $9 minimum wage in context | Economic Policy Institute
Just so you know.
3 tags
“But many lower-profile migrants have virtually no voice on the Hill....”
– Immigration Reform Set to Boost Business, Undermine Rights - Michelle Chen - In These Times
Read. Two-tier (or more) immigration policy is probably coming, and it’s not good.
4 tags
“Today the main barriers to further progress toward gender equity no longer lie...”
– Why Gender Equality Stalled - NYTimes.com
Read this. That is all.
4 tags
“Saying a federal push has made his own efforts to raise the minimum wage in New...”
– Cuomo recasts pay hike debate - Times Union
And here it comes. Cuomo’s got the excuse he wanted not to have to raise the minimum wage after all: Obama’s call for a federal minimum wage hike of $9/hour and indexed to inflation.
We all saw it coming—as Blake Zeff wrote, Cuomo has a...
4 tags
“Raising the minimum wage benefits more than just low-wage workers. When people...”
– The Minimum Wage: Popular With the Public, But Not the Donor Class - The Demos Blog - PolicyShop
Mijin Cha makes a great point here that people who follow me are probably already aware of. But looking at it laid out like this raises the question: if raising the minimum wage would actually increase...
2 tags
“Broadly, what unites us as a class is opposition to compulsory virtue, to whore...”
– Waging War On Sex Workers, Zoe Schlanger interviews Melissa Gira Grant - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics
“opposition to compulsory virtue.” Love it.
3 tags
“Business leaders and plump Washington lawmakers would do well to try to step...”
– Denying minimum-wage workers a raise is craven and grotesque | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Yep.
4 tags
“However much one cursed at the time, one realized afterwards that one had been...”
– Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, p 104.
I am reading this on my night in, and this paragraph is everything I love about Orwell. Marx might prove that capitalism is horrible and in need of replacement, and countless other thinkers have elaborated and analyzed and planned, but Orwell is the one who makes...
4 tags
Doing More with Less | Jacobin →
Read it. I’ll have some thoughts later, but right now, I like where Chris is going with this. The potency of strikes at Walmart and fast-food restaurants recently shows that you don’t need “membership” in order to make news, and taking action has resulted in new people willing to take more action.
5 tags
“There’s no simple solution to this, and Sandberg’s arguments for how to...”
– Exclusive: First Look At Sheryl Sandberg’s New Book - Corporate Intelligence - WSJ
Really, the last line of this piece is the kicker: “If Tip O’Neill were alive today,” she says, “I might tell him I’m a pom-pom girl for feminism.”
I know there will no doubt be adoring reviews of this book in...
6 tags
“No, that waitress isn’t flirting with you.
Neither is the barista at...”
– Grin and Abhor It: The Truth Behind ‘Service with a Smile’ - Working In These Times
I also wrote about emotional labor as women’s work for In These Times—bonus insights into my own years waiting tables.
4 tags
“Jean Anyon, professor of social and educational policy at the City University of...”
– What You Need to Know About the Seattle Teachers’ Rebellion and the Deeply Flawed Test That Inspired It | Alternet
I wrote about the Seattle teachers’ test strike—originally for the PSC-CUNY staff paper, the Clarion, and reprinted a longer version at AlterNet. Thanks to both...
3 tags
3 tags
4 tags
“Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the...”
– Audre Lorde, Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference (via ethiopienne)
I was talking with Molly Crabapple about “women’s art” and Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera before she left for Mexico and I was trying to find this exact quote because it was so important to me,...
January 2013
17 posts
2 tags
“What does become clear when researchers look at this problem is that women...”
– The Ambition Myth: Debunking a Common Excuse for the Gender Wage Gap - Bryce Covert - The Atlantic
And more relevant than that terrible AOL piece.
3 tags
“Workers’ centers are movements in search of institutions,” says Ana Avendaño,...”
– Alt-Labor
This whole piece, by my dear comrade Josh Eidelson, is worth a read. But this line just jumped out at me because it’s the most honest thing I’ve ever heard an AFL-CIO official say about the current state of the labor “movement.” I’ve said many times that we...
4 tags
This made me physically ill this morning.
Harvard’s Hannah Riley Bowles and Carnegie Mellon’s Linda Babcock have been studying this subject for the past five years. In their most recent study, published last August in Psychology of Women Quarterly, they got hundreds of people to watch videos of women and men following different negotiation “scripts,” and then had them judge whether they would give the negotiator...
2 tags
“At Aaron’s NYC memorial service, Freedom to Connect’s David Isenberg said...”
– Memory to myth: tracing Aaron Swartz through the 21st century | The Verge
I have approximately a million things to do today and tech and social change is Melissa’s beat more than mine, but I wanted to flag this anyway because it pinged me.
I didn’t know Aaron Swartz. A lot of my...
2 tags
Thinking about Roe
Thinking about abortion.
Thinking about the people who couldn’t get an abortion because they couldn’t afford it, the people right after Sandy who had to put them off and go out of state and jump through hoops because some law or other restricts when and where and how you can make decisions about your own body.
Thinking about Thomas Frank in What’s the Matter with...
2 tags
“Germany, France and nine other euro zone countries got a go-ahead on Tuesday to...”
– EU states get blessing for financial trading tax | Reuters
About damn time. Now, US?
4 tags
“Consumer advocates have complained that U.S. mortgage lenders are getting off...”
– Big Banks Get Tax Break On Foreclosure Abuse Deal
Even Chuck Grassley realizes this is class war.
And Sherrod Brown is fighting it, of course:
At least one lawmaker, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, wants regulators to bar the tax deductibility of the lenders’ costs. Brown made his argument in...
3 tags
Radio Dispatch →
So Melissa Gira Grant and I talked about our Dissent magazine pieces, feminism, labor, Marx, media, Facebook, organizing, etc. with John Knefel on Radio Dispatch.
5 tags
“The actual change in the wage distribution, however, did not look anything like...”
– Job polarization in the 2000s? | Economic Policy Institute
It’s not robots.
Or rather, robots/technology aren’t the reason that inequality is growing.
This whole post is wonky but worth a read because we’re seeing this argument a lot lately.
It’s of particular interest...
CHARTS: Everyone Is Throwing Away Too Much Food |... →
To follow up on that response to the “online grocery stores will save us!” piece at GOOD, here’s a reality check from Mother Jones. Hint: Food waste isn’t going to be solved by ordering groceries from Amazon.com.
1 tag
“As someone dedicated to building bridges between the labor and environmental...”
– Erik Loomis | When Labor Becomes Justified in Hating Environmentalists
Unlike my friend Erik, I’m not terribly interested in saving jobs just for the sake of jobs. But I do agree with his larger point here, which is that this post is an excellent example of the kind of thing that sets...
1 tag
WatchThe rising of our women is the rising of us all…
