As anyone thinking about enrolling in a college or university knows, tuition is not cheap. The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA) notes that since the early 1980s, tuition has risen by approximately seven percent a year, causing two-thirds of students to borrow to complete their degrees. Although grants and outright scholarships exist, part of the problem, NASFAA’s website explains, is that “in 1975 the states picked up 60 percent of the tab while families shouldered 33 percent” and the federal government picked up the balance. Thirty-eight years later, the states pay approximately 34 percent and the feds pay 16 percent, leaving students and their families to shell out – often through loans – the remaining half.
And it’s getting worse. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, since the start of the recession in 2008, “cuts to higher education have been severe and almost universal.”
» Read more about: Tuition Woes Hurting Women Students More »
In a new report, University of Southern California professor and warehousing and logistics expert Juan D. de Lara reveals that the local warehousing industry is relying on low-paid, temporary workers at serious risk to the ongoing economic health of the region.
De Lara takes a closer look at labor and census statistics to unpack actual warehouse worker wages.
“It should be clear that most blue collar warehouse workers earn far less than the average logistics annual wage of $45,000,” De Lara writes in Work: Path to the Middle Class or Road to Economic Insecurity?, released by USC’s Program for Environmental and Regional Equality. “Any conversation about the future of the logistics industry as a key driver in the Inland Empire’s regional economy should begin with an honest assessment of blue-collar vs. white collar wages.”
While the average logistics wage is often taken at face value,
» Read more about: USC Report: Low Wages Damaging Inland Empire Economy »
In a move to slash the retirement benefits of public employees in California, a group of mostly conservative policy advocates has been working behind the scenes on a possible 2014 ballot initiative. A copy of the still-secret draft initiative, which could dramatically impact the lives of hundreds of thousands of Californians and send a signal nationwide, has been obtained by Frying Pan News. (See the document’s text following this article or click here.)
If enacted, the proposed law would allow the state and local governments to cut back retirement benefits for current employees for the years of work they perform after the changes go into effect. Previous efforts to curb retirement benefits for public employees have largely focused on newly hired workers, but the initiative would shrink pensions for workers who are currently on the job.
“This initiative defines that a government employee’s ‘vested rights’ only applies to pension and retiree healthcare benefits earned for service already rendered,
» Read more about: Exclusive: Pension-Cutting Ballot Initiative Revealed »
It is 3 p.m., June 27, 2013 and I find myself walking on the sidewalk along Pacific Coast Highway in Newport Beach. Just like any other day in Southern California, the skies are blue, the sun is bright gold and the owners of new BMWs, Mercedes Benzes and Maseratis speed down the highway without a care in the world. Unlike any other day, I find myself among a delegation of community members, clergy, reporters and union representatives in support of Joe Dickson and his co-workers.
We march towards the elegant Newport Beach Balboa Bay Country Club to speak with Alireza Mahdavi before he gives a speech to a group of investors and financiers at a convention. We certainly did not pay $900 to have some alone time with the CEO of American Logistics International; I don’t think any of us have that kind of money to spend on a chicken dinner alone.
» Read more about: Alireza Mahdavi: Come Out, Come Out Wherever You Are! »
Negotiating a fair contract is a complex process that involves hard work and commitment from both labor and management. When both sides bargain in good faith and share a goal of securing a deal, a deal eventually gets done. I’ve personally been involved in many tough negotiations that ended with a fair deal that both parties could live with. It takes patience and willingness from both sides to compromise.
In the BART [Bay Area Rapid Transit] negotiations, unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case. BART management paid Thomas Hock, an out-of-state lawyer with a history of driving disputes to a strike, nearly $400,000 to lead negotiations. Hock and his company have been responsible for seven strikes, 47 unfair labor practice charges and nine discrimination lawsuits. Not exactly a history of committing to compromise in order to secure a deal.
True to form, Hock hasn’t been serious about negotiating a resolution at BART that would spare the Bay Area a strike.
California’s relationship with redevelopment just got more complicated, now that state Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) has temporarily withdrawn SB 1.
Steinberg had fought hard for his personally authored bill, which would have replaced California’s old system of community redevelopment agencies (CRAs), which were dissolved in 2011, with Sustainable Community Investment Authorities. Yet as the legislature’s fall session began, he calculated there was a strong possibility of Governor Jerry Brown vetoing the measure. (Last year Brown vetoed SB 1156, an earlier incarnation of Steinberg’s legislation.)
Steinberg withdrew the bill September 12, just as SB 1 was headed back to the Assembly for further discussion.
SB 1’s tactical withdrawal puts on hold the hopes of cities to build healthy, sustainable economies. Despite occasional planning mistakes made by some CRAs in the past, there is still an urgent need for rational urban planning that benefits all communities,
» Read more about: Redevelopment Measure SB 1 Temporarily Withdrawn »
When Kentucky’s legislature adopted a bill intended to transform the Bluegrass State’s troubled pension system last spring, state officials were ecstatic. Signing the bill into law on April 4, Democratic governor Steve Beshear hailed it as groundbreaking legislation that would “solve the most pressing financial problem facing our state – our monstrous unfunded pension liability and the financial instability of our pension fund.”
Not everyone was convinced.
Critics, who include pension-fund experts, lawmakers and AARP Kentucky, claim the new law will hurt workers, taxpayers and retirees. What’s more, they say the law was largely crafted behind the scenes by an unusual alliance between two out-of-state organizations: the Pew Center on the States and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. Some detractors go further and assert that the Arnold Foundation is using Pew’s sterling reputation for academic integrity as a fig leaf to hide its own free-market agenda.
» Read more about: Promise Breakers: How Pew Trusts Is Helping to Gut Public Employee Pensions »
It’s been 100 years since ideological conservatives joined with doctors and insurance companies to kill the first movement in the United States for what was then called “compulsory health care.” Now, on the eve of their epic loss, those who deeply hate the idea that we have a collective responsibility to care for each other are desperately trying to stop history’s clock.
Beneath the tested rhetoric from opponents like the Heritage Foundation and Texas Senator Ted Cruz about a government takeover or Obamacare killing jobs and the economy, we can find expressions of the driving force behind the right’s obsession. One telling quote is from Missouri State Senator Rob Schaaf, who declared, “We can’t afford everything we do now, let alone provide free medical care to able-bodied adults.” Another is the proud statement from Steve Lonegan, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in New Jersey, who told me in a debate on Obamacare at the FDR Library,
» Read more about: In Sickness and In Health: Defending Obamacare »
My name is Dana Wilson and I am a professional dancer. Whether I am performing with a major recording artist, or busting a move in television and film, it is my job to entertain and evoke emotion through movement. It is also my job to make it look easy.
The reality is, dancers train tirelessly, sacrifice our bodies and dedicate our lives to our work, and sometimes all we get in return is “the experience.” Most of us are young (twenty-somethings) and female. We are all are eager to work and it has taken a long time to gain respect as a work force. We have unions that represent us when we work on television shows and movies, but much of our work is still nonunion and many of us are without health insurance. Meanwhile, our bodies are taking a beating and we are always one injury away from unemployment.
Dancers’ Alliance is an organization formed by dancers and run by dancers to unite us and improve our working conditions.
Out of 300 million Americans, a few thousand wield disproportionate economic and political influence because of their positions at the pinnacle of America’s corporate and media establishments or their roles as political allies (or puppets) of the corporate ruling class. C. Wright Mills described this group in his 1956 book, The Power Elite; G. William Domhoff has updated this analysis in his book, Who Rules America? (now in its seventh edition), and Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have described how the power elite wields its influence in Winner-Take-All Politics.
Many of them have overlapping memberships on the boards of the largest corporations, business lobby groups, universities and think tanks, foundations and media conglomerates. They are not part of a conspiracy. They do not meet secretly to plot America’s future. And they do disagree with each other on some issues,
» Read more about: Dinner for 20 Schmucks: An Elite Hall of Shame »
Recovery?
What recovery? The economic outlook may have picked up for some Americans, but not for those in the bottom income brackets – and especially children — according to figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau on Tuesday.
In fact, there were nearly seven million more people living in poverty in 2012 than there were in 2008, the beginning of the Great Recession.
Overall, 46.5 million people were living at or below the poverty line last year, according to the agency’s major annual report on the issue, the Current Population Survey. And more than one-fifth of children, or 16 million youth, were living in poverty, the survey showed.
“They are still the age group suffering the most poverty,” Deborah Weinstein, executive director of the Coalition on Human Needs, said in a statement.
It was the 11th year in the last 12 that poverty “worsened or failed to improve,” according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
One in four adolescents in California—nearly one million—aren’t getting as much physical activity as they need to maintain a healthy weight. When a young Latino child living in a highly industrialized community gets out to play, how much good does that physical activity do her growing lungs if she’s inhaling a toxic soup of air pollution and greenhouse gases? What if she is more likely to get struck by a speeding car than she is to benefit from a lifetime of physical activity? For an African American child who has no nearby park, safe sidewalks or fresh air, there’s got to be a better answer.
A constellation of factors in the physical, social, economic and service environment are referred to as the social determinants of health because they have an overwhelming influence on health, quality of life and death rates, as compared to medical care — which is only responsible for 10-15 percent of what determines how healthy we are and how long we live.
» Read more about: How SB 1 Can Help Reduce Health Inequities »
Sunday’s Los Angeles Times carried one of those state-of-the-economy articles indicating that Americans are becoming more realistic in their estimates of their place on the country’s social ladder. Headlined, “Amid slow economic recovery, more Americans identify as ‘lower class,’” Emily Alpert’s feature focused on the latest General Social Survey, a 40-year research project conducted biannually by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago.
The upshot is that fewer low-income people are clinging to the fantasy that they form part of the “middle class” – or even the “working class.” Instead, they are coming to realize that they help comprise the “lower class,” a destination once regarded as an economic leper colony but now accepted as just another fact of life.
As Alpert reports, the GSS revealed that “a record 8.4 percent of Americans put themselves in that category — more than at any other time in the four decades that the question has been asked on the General Social Survey.”
Since the start of the 2009 recession we’ve become acquainted with – almost inured by – metrics showing how high up on the economic pyramid people unreasonably see themselves.
» Read more about: A Touch of Class: Knowing Our Place on the Social Ladder »
Are our rich content? It’s a question that bounces back and forth in the blogosphere. Are elites, economic and otherwise, happy with the pace of the weak recovery? Are they indifferent? Or are they actively worse off than they would be if unemployment were lower?
This question comes up when Emmanuel Saez updates his data on the incomes of the top one percent. Most of the coverage has focused on the rate of change for incomes of the top one percent, particularly the fact that the top one percent have enjoyed 95 percent of all income growth from 2009 to 2012. But I want to focus on levels. I’m going to modify one of Saez’s charts to show something I don’t think has been pointed out:
This is the percentage of all income, excluding capital gains, that goes to the top one percent.
» Read more about: Why 2012 Was the One Percent’s Favorite Year Since 1928 »
(Note: Katha Pollitt’s feature first appeared in The Nation and is republished with permission.)
Here’s a little window into poverty, American- style. According to a Yale University study published in August in Pediatrics magazine, almost 30 percent of low-income women with children in diapers can’t afford an adequate supply of them, with Hispanic women and grandmothers raising grandchildren the most likely to be in need. Some women are forced to make one or two nappies last the whole day, emptying them out and putting them back on the baby. Based on a survey of almost 900 low-income women in and around New Haven, Connecticut, investigators found the lack of diapers—such a simple thing—had profound and complex effects. The risks to children’s health are obvious: rashes, urinary tract infections, painful chafing. (If a mom is too poor to afford diapers, she probably can’t afford diaper cream or wipes or baby powder,
In 2004, after a long string of Republican governors and the shockingly narrow defeat of Prop. 72—which would have ushered in the most progressive health care reform ever implemented in the United States—California labor leaders got mad. And then they got organized.
“We said, we’re never going to lose that bad again—what do we have to do to change?” said California Labor Federation Executive Secretary-Treasurer Art Pulaski, who moderated [last] Wednesday’s AFL-CIO 2013 Convention panel discussion “Winning and Building Over Time: Winning in California and You Can, Too.”
The federation decided to do an extensive poll of all of their unions and labor council affiliates, asking members how they voted, who they voted for and what kinds of actions they took, and then conducting an analysis. They discovered that some unions and locals were vastly out-performing others, and that if each affiliate had carried their own weight,
Today Walmart opened its newest supermarket, a 33,000-square-foot “grocery store” on the Chinatown corner of Cesar Chavez and Grand avenues. It’s a stone’s throw from Our Lady of the Angels’ stained-glass windows and within shouting distance of dozens of small local businesses now threatened with extinction. Local community groups had fought Walmart’s arrival as a corporate intrusion into the historic neighborhood – the store represents the retail giant’s deepest penetration into urban Los Angeles yet.
For now the new store’s critics and business competitors await the worst.
“It’s just sad for a small economy like Chinatown’s to have a large national chain whose money is going out of state and not staying in the community,” says Steven Y. Wong, interim executive director of Los Angeles’ Chinese American Museum. Wong, who says that his comments are his private opinions and not those of the museum, adds that the store “drastically changes the character of the neighborhood and will have a long-term,
» Read more about: As Walmart’s Chinatown Store Opens, Questions Remain »
Forbes magazine, which calls itself the “capitalist tool,” seems to have a penchant for publishing right-wing diatribes posing as serious economic analyses. The latest is by Paul Roderick Gregory, who accuses me of “false facts and false theories” in a recent piece I wrote about why high wages are good for the economy.
If I’m correct, Gregory asks, how could it possibly be that America become world’s richest and most powerful economy in late nineteenth century, when the typical worker was earning peanuts?
Gregory claims to be an economic historian but he doesn’t seem to know American history. The answer is simple: Ours was a land of unbounded natural resources. We also found it relatively easy to copy the industrial advances of England and Germany, and erected a protective tariff so that our manufacturers didn’t have to compete directly with them. A giant wave of immigrants came to our shores,
Lazy. Out of touch. Greedy. Self-serving. Thuggish.
Chances are you’ve heard a union member or leader called one of these things (and in all likelihood, more than once), and it made your blood boil. The unfortunate truth is that misconceptions, stereotypes and all-out lies seem to be dominating the public discussion and perception of labor unions, even among some progressives. We in the labor movement know that unions stand for the working class as the sole and vital counterbalance to corporate greed and excess…but no one else seems to have gotten the memo.
That disconnect—between what we actually do and what others think we do—is the impetus behind yesterday’s action session at the AFL-CIO Convention, entitled “10 Ways to Change How People See Unions.” Featuring AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Elizabeth Shuler, AFSCME’s Chris Policano and Brandon Weber of Upworthy’s Workonomics, this exciting session focused on reintroducing unions to America by focusing on what we actually do every day for working families.
» Read more about: 10 Ways to Change How People See Unions »
See original feature by Gary Cohn, “Slash and Burn: The War Against California Pensions.”