labor
tsmith | February 7, 2013I didn't grow up on a farm, but my dad did. He was the youngest of 13 kids, several of them who grew up to own farms of their own. As a kid, my family had almost an acre in the country, but the only animals we kept on it were stray cats and the occasional opossum (the latter, not on purpose). Still, the school I attended was definitely in a rural, farming community, and I frequently spent time at my Grandma's farm. She'd downsized since her kids were young and working the farm, but even when I was a kid and she was in her early 80s, she still kept chickens for eggs, cows for milk and meat,…
catdynamics | March 29, 2011After the Cronon affair, more Freedom of Information Act requests targeting faculty at public universities.
Clearly Walkers in Wisconsin in Labor are of interest to Republicans who Protest Democratic conspiracies against Governors and nothing makes the Maddow than Moore nonsense about injunctions and organized astroturf lawmaking.
"The squid has eaten the squirrel!"
These important matters should be emailed to everywhere in the .edu domain.
Hey, if I am served, does that mean some paralegal will sort my inbox for me...?
Win!
sastyk | March 24, 2011From Alternet (actual Bill text at site), it turns out that House Republicans have a plan to prevent fighting for labor rights - hunger!: Maybe they've got firehoses too! And attack dogs, that would be good. Or maybe they could just shoot them - that's an old favorite way to disrupt strikes!
Much of the bill is based upon verifying that those who receive food stamps benefits are meeting the federal requirements for doing so. However, one section buried deep within the bill adds a startling new requirement. The bill, if passed, would actually cut off all food stamp benefits to any family…
cagapakis | March 23, 2010I read R.C. Lewontin's Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA over the weekend and was struck in particular by one line in his wonderful diatribe against biological determinism and reductionism:
"Intellectuals in their self-flattering wish-fulfillment say that knowledge is power, but the truth is that knowledge further empowers only those who have or can acquire the power to use it."
This is something that was really hard to read at first, especially as someone who is overeducated and clearly spends a lot of time thinking about educating other people about science. But I realized that it…
razib | February 25, 2010Mike the Mad Biologist has a post up, Yes, We Have a PhD Glut... Which is interesting, because it isn't has if getting a doctorate is financially lucrative. Though getting a medical doctorate is financially lucrative. Perhaps the medical profession has the right idea, control labor supply?* Right idea for medical doctors at least....
* At least the medical profession hasn't opened the floodgate and enabled the overproduction of those with MDs who will never practice the profession and so be saddled with a lot of debt, which is the case with the legal profession (and for those who do pass the…
emjohnson | December 1, 2009
There are two fundamental misconceptions surrounding the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle ten years ago this week. One is that the protests represented a "riot" and that the majority of protesters were violent. The second is that the protests were counter-productive and actually hurt the cause of reform that would benefit poor countries trying to have their voices heard. Both of these are wrong and, in fact, are just the opposite.
Many of those who went to Seattle did intend to shut down the proceedings, which they did nonviolently by creating blockades and…
emjohnson | November 30, 2009This week, ten years ago, between 50,000 and 100,000 protesters from a wide variety of labor, environmental and global justice organizations descended on the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference being held in Seattle and prevented delegates from reaching the convention hall. This effectively shut down the talks and focused public attention on an undemocratic institution that had previously been little understood. Delegates from more than forty poor African, Caribbean and Latin American nations were united in opposition to their treatment by the wealthy countries and the public…
emjohnson | November 17, 2009As I posted earlier, graduate teaching assistants at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had voted to authorize a strike unless the university negotiated with them in good faith. It appears that this strike was a success because at 7pm EST tonight the Strike Committee of the Graduate Employees' Organization (GEO) at UIUC unanimously voted to suspend the strike that had brought the University to a standstill for two days. According to a press release posted at GEO's website the agreement with the university "achieved gains across all four "pillars" of its original contract…
emjohnson | November 11, 2009In an overwhelming majority members of the Graduate Employee's Organization (GEO) at the University of Illinois at at Urbana-Champaign authorized their union to to go on strike if the university doesn't change direction in their current negotiations.
According to a GEO Press Release sent out Monday:
Over the course of a three day vote, an overwhelming 92% of participating GEO members chose to authorize a strike against the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. With the vote, GEO members have given the strike committee of the GEO a clear mandate to call a strike at any time. The…
emjohnson | July 22, 2009Earlier this week a classified Scientology contract was leaked (full pdf document here), revealing the paranoid nature of the Church. The document is entitled Application, Declaration and General Release Declaration of Religious Commitment and Application for Membership in a Scientology Religious Order and for Active Participation on Church Staff. This contract must be signed by anyone who wishes to engage in "active participation as a staff member within the Church of Scientology" as a Class V Org member.
Among the items they must agree to are:
8. I am not related to or connected with any…
razib | April 8, 2009The New York Times has an awesome interactive map which shows which sectors the foreign born from various countries are concentrated. Nothing too surprising, but nice to see it quantitatively displayed. Below the fold screenshots from "Computer software developers" and "Skilled construction workers."
purepedantry | January 22, 2009Health-infrastructure, information technology, and science research spending are clearly related to the success of our economy. They represent investments into intellectual property and human capital that increase productivity and create long-term growth. For this reason, I don't object to the government spending money on them as a matter of policy.
But Gary Becker makes an interesting point with respect to the economic stimulus package. While such spending may be important for long-term growth, it's effectiveness as a short-term growth measure may be limited:
The stimulus package's plans…
purepedantry | May 12, 2008Recently, there were a set of posts arguing for different models of the effects of the minimum wage on employment. Megan McArdle argues that perfect competition models of the effects of minimum wage on the labor market implies that increases in the minimum wage will raise unemployment. Kathy G at Crooked Timber disagrees. She argues that a more accurate model of the minimum wage is a monopsony model. Monopsony is the opposite of monopoly meaning that there is one buyer -- in this case one employer. (Feel free to ignore the very bloggeresque sniping.)
Basically the core disagreement seems…
kcontreary | August 23, 2007Every now and then, it behooves us to stop listening to the shouting heads on television and look at some numbers. A new study by the Pew Hispanic Center shows that Latino immigrants are moving up the economic ladder, out of low-wage jobs and into middle-wage employment.
The survey uses the hourly wage distribution in the US to examine relative income, dividing the distribution into five groups: low, low-middle, middle, high-middle, and high (bonus points for creativity!). Demographic group data comparisons from 1995 and 2005 provide the basis for inference about economic mobility. Both…