Category: Labor

Steve Matthews has a piece in Bloomberg arguing that the underemployment rate among young college graduates remains elevated and that this is a sign that the labor market is unhealthy and that labor market slack still remains. I am sympathetic to the idea that the labor market remains unhealthy and that slack still remains, but… Continue reading Has Underemployment Among College Graduates Gone Up?

Recently, much attention has been paid to cops behaving the way cops often behave: killing blacks, harassing blacks, abusing blacks, and so on. One line of commentary on this newfound interest in long-standing cop abuse is that this abuse is the fault of (or cannot be stopped because of) police unions. While I have no… Continue reading Cop Unions

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig has a post about Erick Erickson saying what conservatives in general believe about low-income workers. Here is Erickson, version one: “What’s going on here — by the way, more than 90% of Americans make more than minimum wage. The minimum wage is mostly people who have failed at life, and high school… Continue reading “Force” arguments continue to be the rhetorical backwater of idiots

Via Mike Elk, I came upon this article in Labor Notes about Piketty. It is written in that affected homespun style that a lot of Labor writing is, and, also like a lot of Labor writing, flippantly dismisses as inferior anti-inequality strategies that don’t involve organizing to cram more money through people’s paychecks: When workers… Continue reading Labor’s paycheck fetishism

From the New York Times: Often companies seek out our services when they’ve begun losing valued employees [because of the working conditions in their office], or a C.E.O. recognizes his own exhaustion, or a young, rising executive suddenly drops dead of a heart attack — a story we’ve been told more than a half dozen… Continue reading The trouble with bad working conditions