Unemployment has risen above 10 percent and no one in Washington seems to understand what is going on. Yesterday, a little noticed release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shed important light onto the job situation. The BLS’s Business Employment Dynamics (BED) program uses unemployment insurance (UI) records to …
Who do the words “union members” bring to mind? United Auto Workers building cars in Detroit? Teamsters truckers hauling freight? Steel workers in Pennsylvania? Not any more. Newly released numbers show that the actual face of today’s union movement is the teller at your local Department of Motorized Vehicles. Preliminary …
Unemployment has risen sharply during this recession and has almost reached 10 percent of the workforce. However policy makers have paid relatively little attention to why unemployment has risen so sharply. With so much coverage of the collapse of the auto industry in Detroit, the finance industry in New York, …
Even as National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers says the stimulus is working he also warned that he expects unemployment to remain unacceptably high for years to come. Unfortunately, Summers is half right: unemployment will probably stay high, but because of – not in spite of – the stimulus bill. …
Sen. Arlen Specter, who opposed the misnamed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) when he was a Republican, recently announced that he has flip-flopped on the issue and will now be supporting EFCA-lite. As Specter described it, the latest version of the bill drops the card-check provision that has attracted so …
The President has promised big labor that after health care reform, he will turn to their top priority … the misnamed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). This legislation effectively eliminates secret ballot elections and replaces them with publicly signed union cards. But while Obama is promising to deprive workers in …
While Americans now celebrate the end of summer over Labor Day weekend, Labor Day originally began in the 1890s as a celebration of “the strength and esprit de corps” of labor unions. In their early days unions fought primarily to improve working conditions and protect workers rights. Large majorities of …
