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Johnson ups staff minimum wage

Wed, 9 Jul 2008 16:09:44 -0700

London mayor to increase wage for City Hall staff to £7.40 an hour and ask hotel industry to follow suit

Irish People Issue Setback to Elite Plans for a Corporate European Superstate

Tue, 8 Jul 2008 17:48:19 -0700

By Mike Whitney - 14/06/08

Ireland delivered a knockout punch to European elites and corporatists and shattered their plan for a...[European Union] Superstate. The so-called Lisbon Treaty was nothing more than a repackaging of the European Constitution that was defeated by French and Dutch voters in 2005. The treaty was loaded with the typical "democratic" gobbledygook to conceal the vicious neoliberal policies at its heart. If it had passed, the treaty would have paved the way for greater privatization of public services, diminished workers rights, less state control over trade policies and civil liberties, and an aggressive plan to militarize Europe.

In The "New Iraq" There Is No Place for Workers Rights

Fri, 6 Jun 2008 10:45:04 -0700

Nunavut's minimum wage rising to $10

Thu, 5 Jun 2008 13:58:45 -0700

The minimum wage in Nunavut will rise to $10 an hour later this year, meaning workers there will have the highest minimum wage in Canada.

Typical retirement income 'less than minimum wage'

Fri, 30 May 2008 03:42:47 -0700

Business & money: A typical worker in the UK would have to survive their retirement on just £215 a week, Fidelity says

Main Street Squeeze

Mon, 26 May 2008 11:49:26 -0700

Source:

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3690/main_street_squeeze/

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Subhead:

Pick your metaphor for the current state of American workers: Are they squeezed? Caught? Crunched? Three new books — by two top-notch national journalists and a leading progressive economist — exploit these images to convey how average Americans are losing out in today’s economy. And despite varied but overlapping prescriptions for new policies, none of the three offers an easy way out.

Body:

In The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker (Knopf, 2008), New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse pulls together some key statistics and compelling personal stories to depict the “broad decline in the status and treatment of American workers,” blue- and white-collar alike, over the past three decades.

Growing inequality costs workers dearly. For example, if the distribution of income today were the same as it was in 1979 (and if the economy had grown at the same rate as it has since then), the average family among the bottom four-fifths of Americans would now be earning $8,000 more each year than it actually does. At the same time, life has become more insecure for most of these working families, with health insurance, pensions and education — as well as the broader social safety net — becoming less generous and more precarious.

Greenhouse’s reporting goes beyond these increasingly familiar inequities to the pressures that workers experience on the job. Wal-Mart managers lock janitors into its buildings overnight. Major companies like Taco Bell force employees to work off the clock or manipulate their time records to cheat them out of pay. Manufacturers like Landis Plastics minimize safety precautions at the cost of workers’ lives and limbs.

Decades ago, Greenhouse argues, managers thought the “happy worker” was good for business, but now, he says, they employ a “bullying model” to “manage by fear.” Workers at the bottom fare worst, but even middle managers suffer from bullies above who are pushing them to cut costs and crush workers.

Although Greenhouse may overstate the benefits for workers from the informal social contract between business, labor and government after World War II, the contrast of today’s conditions with that period is harshly instructive. In a quickly sketched account, he blames — with varying degrees of emphasis — the deterioration of standards on globalization, immigration, union-busting (as well as unions’ own shortcomings), declining enforcement of labor laws and the growing power of investors.

But Greenhouse does best when telling the stories of workers like Kathy Saumier, who courageously — though unsuccessfully — fought to form a union that could stop safety hazards, sex discrimination and exploitation at the upstate New York Landis factory. Or managers like Drew Pooters, who was morally offended by demands from superiors at two corporations where he worked — Toys “R” Us and Family Dollar — to cheat employees out of pay for work they had completed.

Although Greenhouse credits some companies (like Costco) with trying to treat their employees better than most do, he makes clear that the big squeeze crushes not only jobs, wages, benefits and economic security, but also the daily work and family lives of millions of workers — and, possibly, the last shreds of human decency.

In Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalization (Bloomsbury, 2008), former Chicago Tribune reporter Richard Longworth covers much of the same ground as Greenhouse. But in recounting the moving personal stories and observations from his travels, Longworth focuses more pointedly than does Greenhouse on the impact of globalization on communities in the Midwest.

Longworth vividly describes how globalization has hurt both small towns, like his hometown of Boone, Iowa, and big cities, like Detroit. But he also finds winners — or at least survivors — in communities like Beardstown, Ill. (where an influx of new immigrants fills the big, long-established meatpacking plant), and Chicago (where its “global city” status seems more precarious to me than Longworth suggests, and where many workers remain major losers).

Much as he laments the damage done, Longworth sees globalization as inevitable and argues that the Midwest must shed its long, successful reliance on manufacturing and find a new role in the modern marketplace. But he seems torn over whether even the most lean-and-mean factories can compete with those in, say, China.

Ironically, the small-town corporate meatpacking factories that he cites as a success — such as the Beardstown Cargill plant — now rely on immigrants because the meatpackers so effectively destroyed the good union wages that once prevailed (and globalization played little role in depressing those standards).

As alternatives, he promotes bioscience to build on the region’s agricultural base, biofuels from cellulosic biomass (but not corn-based ethanol) and high-speed rail to link Midwestern cities. All are potentially promising but not likely to replace the jobs and wages lost in manufacturing.

Ultimately, Longworth writes, the region must shed old, parochial thinking and emphasize education, embrace immigration and work together more as a region. The advice makes sense but it suffers from the assumption that we can’t also change globalization as it currently exists.

In Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed? (And Other Unsolved Economic Mysteries) (Berrett-Koehler, 2008), economist Jared Bernstein tries to elucidate the “mysteries” of his book’s subtitle. Organized around a collection of questions average people often ask about the economy — such as, “What’s right and wrong about globalization?” — the book wittily and succinctly explains basic concepts (like gross domestic product) and discusses major issues (such as healthcare reform and poverty).

More than Greenhouse and Longworth, Bernstein — who works with the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute — offers explanations of the big squeeze. The heart of the problem, he argues, is growing inequality.

The elite opinion makers’ explanation, which conveniently shifts the blame to each individual, is always that more education will mean less inequality. But the sectors adding the most new jobs in the near future won’t require skills much beyond those provided by a high school education, and many jobs needing higher skills will face global competition that will displace work and drive down wages.

While the bottom 90 percent of Americans have fared poorly with flat or declining incomes, many of the educated haven’t done well, either. Bernstein notes that between 2001 and 2005, the incomes of the “only pretty rich” (from the 90th to 99th percentiles in income) grew 3 percent in real terms. The income of the top 1 percent, meanwhile, grew 23 percent.

The problem isn’t education. It’s power. “Those who hold a privileged position in the economic power hierarchy,” he writes, “are able to steer the bulk of growth their way.”

Globalization has played a part in that power shift, but Bernstein argues globalization can’t (and, he implies, shouldn’t) be stopped. It can, however, be shaped.

To reduce inequality, Bernstein advocates federal full-employment policy, infrastructure spending, energy independence, national health insurance, broader social insurance, better control of immigration (and better integration of immigrants already here), public service jobs for the hard-to-employ, minimum wage increases, easier access to higher education and more widespread unionization.

When it comes to strategy, however, Bernstein reverts to a hope that modest centrist initiatives will spin out into broader challenges to the holders of economic power. But what’s needed is a movement that directly challenges the powerful and offers more ambitious hopes, nurtured by grassroots organizers and leaders who are willing to make inequality — and the big squeeze on American workers — central to the political debate.
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David Moberg, a senior editor of In These Times, has been on the staff of the magazine since it began publishing. Before joining In These Times, he completed his work for a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago and worked for Newsweek. Recently he has received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Nation Institute for research on the new global economy.

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In These Times

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Gangs defend South Africa violence

Fri, 23 May 2008 02:15:06 -0700

They say foreigners undermining minimum wage and years of fighting white rule.

Haiti: Civil society organisations call for an increase in the minimum wage

Sat, 10 May 2008 10:00:13 -0700

New online course gets back to basics on employment standards

Fri, 9 May 2008 11:00:00 -0700

A new online program will help Albertans gain a better understanding of their basic rights and responsibilities in the workplace.

The Basics of Employment Standards eLearning course focuses on requirements under the Employment Standards Code and is broken into eight learning modules:

records and statements of earnings and pay stubs;
minimum wage and hours of work;
overtime;
general holidays;
vacation;
maternity and parental leave;
employment of adolescents and young people; and
termination of employment.

Rich Wage Class War, Not StatsCan

Tue, 6 May 2008 16:15:15 -0700

by Linda McQuaig - May 06, 2008

...[D]uring [the 1950's, '60's, and '70's] the share of income received by the richest 1 per cent actually declined...The rich didn't like this, and have been waging a kind of class war ever since, convincing governments to impose "neo-conservative" policies like lower minimum wages, tighter monetary policy, less social insurance protection, open markets and shifting the tax burden from capital to labour...The results have been grim for many Canadians, but spectacular for the rich, particularly the very rich.

P.E.I. raises minimum wage

Fri, 2 May 2008 04:01:30 -0700

The minimum wage on Prince Edward Island increased to $7.75 an hour on Thursday.

MINIMUM WAGE INCREASES IN MAY

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 10:00:00 -0700

Saskatchewan's minimum wage will increase from $8.25 per hour to $8.60 per hour effective May 1, 2008.

Calgary eyes $12 minimum wage for anyone doing city work

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 21:00:00 -0700

CALGARY -- A bid to make sure that anyone who works for the City of Calgary -- even through an outside contractor -- earns at least $12 an hour has narrowly passed a civic committee but could face a tougher ride when it goes to city council.

Minimum Wage Goes Up Monday

Wed, 2 Apr 2008 23:00:30 -0700

A Better Standard Of Living For Hard Working Families TORONTO, March 28 - NEWS When minimum wage earners in Ontario go to work Monday, they will be getting a raise. Ontario is raising the minimum wage to $8.75 on March 31, 2008. This is the fifth increase since 2004. The minimum wage (http://www.labour.gov.on.ca/.....

Minimum wage scare

Wed, 2 Apr 2008 23:00:23 -0700

Some social activists are calling it "recession spook" – the talk of a looming economic downturn and the subsequent need to rein in the province's anti-poverty agenda.

Minimum wage hike does little for frantic employers

Tue, 1 Apr 2008 10:18:09 -0700

Newfoundland and Labrador's minimum wage jumped Tuesday, although it's expected to have little effect on employers who are already desperate to find workers.

Labour says Alberta's minimum wage hike not nearly enough

Tue, 1 Apr 2008 10:03:51 -0700

An Alberta labour organization says the province's 40-cent wage hike on April Fool's Day is a sad joke.

Labour says Alberta's minimum wage hike not nearly enough

Tue, 1 Apr 2008 10:03:51 -0700

An Alberta labour organization says the province's 40-cent wage hike on April Fool's Day is a sad joke.

Small businesses down on the rising costs of paying workers

Tue, 1 Apr 2008 08:50:51 -0700

Small business owners in New Brunswick say the third minimum wage hike in the province in slightly more than a year is starting to cut into their bottom line.

Minimum wage scare

Tue, 1 Apr 2008 01:30:00 -0700

Some social activists are calling it "recession spook" – the talk of a looming economic downturn and the subsequent need to rein in the province's anti-poverty agenda.