Skip to main content

War on Labor

By


It was 32 years ago that Ronald Reagan and the Republicans began their assault on organized labor, by staring down the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO).  Since then we have seen a steady erosion of labor rights, stagnated wages and more and more companies using part-time employment (up to 35 hours per week) to avoid providing health care and unemployment compensation to its workers.

Walmart is the most notorious example of this. PBS provided a broad outline of Walmart's hiring practices in Store Wars, but this didn't stop Forbes from ranking Walmart as one of the 100 best corporations to work for, even going so far as to blame "Obamacare" for Walmart's increased use of temps, which has been a practice used long before Obama came to town.

Obama and the Democrats have made few in-roads over the last 5 years, but the attempt to spread government health care to a broader segment of the population took an important first step today, as you can now open your own personal "Obamacare" account.

Still, the battle to raise the minimum wage to a living wage is thwarted by Congressional Republicans.  This hasn't stopped municipalities from establishing their own minimum wages, such as San Francisco, which set $10.55 an hour as the baseline.  Even still, it is below the $11 most economists regard as the bare minimum to meet today's cost of living.

This didn't stop Fox's purported "financial analyst" Neil Cavuto from offering viewers a little anecdote how he started out at two bucks an hour at Arthur Treacher's in 1974.  He didn't bother to tell his listeners that if that same starting wage was adjusted for inflation, it would be $9.47 per hour today, more than most fast food workers get.  But, it seems the GOP lives in a world not adjusted for inflation, at least not at the bottom rung of the ladder.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more