June 12, 2013
Keynesianism apparently is winning converts among small business even though that sector seems to have been doing somewhat better than larger enterprises. The converts, however, are not in Congress and the only macro activism is coming from the Fed.
June 10, 2013
"Extra! Extra! Rich Corp Execs Shut Down the NLRB!" Believe it or not, that is today's news.
And believe it or not, shutting down the National Labor Relations Board was also big news from 1935-1937, when the American Liberty League (ALL), a collection of prominent corporate executives plus their wealthy allies, put their money where their mouths were to shut the NLRB down.
Right-Wing Obstructionism in the Great Recession
Shutting down the NLRB has also been in the news in recent...
June 8, 2013
Mitchell’s Musings 6-10-13: Remarks on Getting LERA’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the St. Louis meetings, June 8, 2013. The uses of history are discussed.
May 31, 2013
The forces animating the debate over immigration policy seem similar today to what they were in the World War One era. But the political consequences and outcomes seem different.
May 30, 2013
So far, we have looked at judicial amendments one at a time. But in the real world of unions and collective bargaining, judicial amendments work together to weaken the employee rights Congress created.
When Congress enacted the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), it included a policy statement that shows it unequivocally valued collective bargaining. Section 1 says, "Experience has proved that protection by law of the right of employees to organize and bargain collectively safeguards...
May 29, 2013
Legend has it that Marie Antoinette, told of Parisians protesting the shortage of bread, impatiently exclaimed, “Let them eat cake.”
American Express’s chief executive, Kenneth I. Chenault, adopted a kinder tone in his commencement speech this year at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, but offered a similar message. Acknowledging that jobs are hard to find, he emphasized that new technology makes it easier to invent them.
Yes, and the price of cake may have fallen...
May 23, 2013
Notions that "change is hard" and "no pain/no gain," can produce misleading conclusions in the context of organizations and in macroeconomic policy.
For many years, employee strikes were common and often in the news while lockouts by employers were rare. Today, lockouts have become far more common than in years past. There are reasons employers have become more willing to lock out their employees.
In both lockouts and strikes, an employer's workers are not working, so it may seem that the only difference between the two is who made the decision for the employees to be out of work. Employees strike when they think striking will put...
Union organizing is important not only because it strengthens workers' voice in collective bargaining, but as the voice for the middle class, it forms a key constituency in legislative battles for progressive public policy
A multistoried structure cobbled together without much oversight, groaning under its own weight, a source of livelihood but a risk to health and safety – sounds like the garment factory building in Bangladesh, whose recent collapse led to the deaths of more than 1,100 workers.
But it’s also a pretty good description of the current system of private regulation labeled “corporate social responsibility” that promises far more to factory workers around the world than it...
