President Obama [has] released a plan to combat rising college costs and make college affordable for American families. The president’s plan outlines three proposals: tying federal student aid to college performance based on yet-to-be developed college rankings; promoting innovation and completion by instituting a college scorecard that would give consumers clear, transparent information on college performance to help them make the decisions that work best for them; and ensuring that student debt remains affordable by expanding eligibility for the Pay As You Earn repayment program. While this federal push is new, many of the ideas have already been tried and tested on the state level, and California’s community college system in particular provides some important data on what we should expect as these proposals are developed.
As a student who has attended community college and is attending a public university, I applaud President Obama for taking this step toward ensuring an affordable higher education for all.
» Read more about: California Community Colleges: Models for Curbing Costs »
Many of us try to be diligent about putting our empty bottles and cans in the blue recycling bin, but what do we do with our apple peels and coffee grounds? Can our lunch leftovers impact the air we breathe and the local economy?
All too often, these food scraps end up in a landfill, where they decompose and emit dangerous levels of methane — a greenhouse gas considered 21 times more damaging to the climate than carbon dioxide. Businesses and residents from the City of Los Angeles send approximately 1.2 million tons of food scraps and yard waste into landfills each year, equivalent to the weight of 600,000 automobiles. Such compostable “organic” material forms nearly a third of California’s landfilled waste.
Recycling instead of landfilling our organic materials only improves our environment, it creates jobs. The Tellus Institute calculated that recovering and recycling our organic materials creates nearly twice the number of jobs as when the same materials are disposed.
» Read more about: How Leftovers Will Let Us Breathe Easier and Create Jobs »
Benjamin Gamboa doesn’t know John Arnold, but they are linked by a shared concern over the fate of public-employee pensions in California.
“I’m proud to have a pension,” the 30-year-old Gamboa says. “I believe every American should have a pension.”
The two men live in very different worlds. Gamboa is a research analyst at Crafton Hills College in Yucaipa, California. Arnold is a hedge-fund billionaire from Houston, Texas.
There’s another difference between them: Arnold recently had a representative present at a secret “pension summit” held at a Sacramento hotel, where strategies to limit public employee retirement benefits were discussed; Gamboa, a union member, did not – representatives of labor were specifically not invited.
“Pension reform” has become the latest battle cry in a seemingly endless war that has ostensibly been declared against tax-dollar waste, but whose single-minded purpose has been to slash the job protections and benefits enjoyed by California’s working middle class.
» Read more about: Slash and Burn: The War Against California Pensions »
Congress will reconvene shortly. That means more battles over taxes and spending, regulations and safety nets, and how to get the economy out of first gear. Which means more gridlock and continual showdowns over budget resolutions and the debt ceiling.
But before the hostilities start again and we all get lost in puerile politics and petty tactics, it’s useful to consider what’s really at stake for our economy and democracy.
For much of the past century, the basic bargain at the heart of America was that employers paid their workers enough to buy what American employers were selling. Government’s role was to encourage and enforce this bargain. We thereby created a virtuous cycle of higher living standards, more jobs, and better wages. And a democracy that worked reasonably well.
But the bargain has been broken. And until it’s remade, the economy can’t mend and our democracy won’t be responsive to the majority.
» Read more about: Why We Fight: Restoring the American Dream »
As the New York Times reported on August 27 (“At Charter Schools, Short Careers By Choice”) most charter school teachers only remain in the profession for two to five years. In contrast, traditional public school teachers average nearly fourteen years of experience. But in the fantasy world of charter school proponents, far from being a shortcoming this lack of teaching experience is a positive. One charter school official told the Times, “There is a certain comfort level that we have with people who are perhaps going to come into YES Prep and not stay forever.” Wendy Kopp, whose Teach for America program is criticized for high turnover, said “The strongest schools develop their teachers tremendously so they become great in the classroom even in their first and second years.”
I’ve never met a teacher who believes they were “great” in their first two years.
» Read more about: Charter School Kool-Aid: Experience “Doesn’t Matter” »
Why are so many Americans wary of labor unions? Unions are, after all, good for everyone who works for a living. In occupations with a high rate of unionization all the workers get paid more, even employees who aren’t in a union. As rates of unionization have fallen, so has compensation. One might expect unions to be all the rage with anyone who ever put in a hard day’s work. But this is not always the case, particularly in the United States.
Americans have WEIRD attitudes towards unions – as in, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. The Canadian behavioralists who coined this acronym were interested in how sweeping generalizations about human psychology and economic behavior might be incorrect if they were based on only one kind of (WEIRD) people, and reviewed a number of cross-cultural studies to make their point. To scholars at the University of British Columbia,
We couldn’t resist. The Fourth of July is the biggest and baddest of all barbecue bonanzas, and so we decided the Union Cookout needed a sequel for Labor Day. Labor 411 is here with our follow-up to last year’s grill special that includes some of the best union-made picnic and party goods around.
(Reposted from Labor 411.)
Check out this handy collection of American Prospect stories on the state of labor and the labor movement in the U.S. The anthology, The Good Fight, can be browsed online or downloaded for offline reading.
It features pieces by Robert Kuttner, Tracy McMillan, Josh Eidelson and Harold Meyerson — including Meyerson’s recent profile of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, “L.A. Story.”
Perfect reading for this Labor Day weekend!
As our nation pauses to observe Labor Day this week, you have to wonder what the future holds for American workers. Rising income inequality, a dwindling middle class, the growth of low-wage jobs without benefits, and unemployment rates that remain uncomfortably high should make us wonder whether we’ve allowed the American Dream to become a mythic fairy tale.
While these realities are certainly dire and downright depressing, they are not insurmountable.
Last month, President Obama began laying out a plan to rebuild America’s manufacturing base and shore up job security with good wages in stable industries. He called for rewarding companies for keeping jobs at home or bringing them back to the U.S. And, he said that we can and must train workers — especially those left farthest behind by the economic downturn — to get on new career tracks that lead them to the middle class.
» Read more about: Transit Investments Can Get Manufacturing Moving Again »
Of all the commemorations of the March on Washington, the one that will best capture its spirit isn’t really a commemoration at all. Thursday, one day after the 50th anniversary of the great march, fast-food and retail workers in as many as 35 cities will stage a one-day strike demanding higher wages.
Sadly, the connection between the epochal demonstration of 1963 and a fast-food strike in 2013 couldn’t be more direct.
The march 50 years ago was, after all, a march “For Jobs and Freedom,” and its focus was every bit as economic as it was juridical and social. Even more directly, one of the demands highlighted by the march’s leaders and organizers was to raise the federal minimum wage — then $1.15 an hour — to $2. According to Sylvia Allegretto and Steven Pitts of the Economic Policy Institute,