Washington | September 11

CBC - Children around the world are producing numerous goods being sold globally, says a report released by the U.S. Department of Labour.

The report released Thursday found that 218 million children work worldwide, and that 126 million of them perform dangerous jobs.

The U.S. Labour Department has identified 122 goods from 58 countries it believes to be produced by forced labour, child labour or a combination of the two. Children commonly work to produce products or crops such as: Cotton, Sugar cane, Tobacco, Coffee, Rice, Cocoa, Bricks, Garments, Carpets, Footwear, Gold, and Coal.

“We very much want to work with others to make sure that we have … as pro-American a tax system for corporations as we possibly can …” Lawrence Summers

The Administration is struggling to fund its spending spree in ways that would nominally be consistent with the President’s campaign promises. The Obama budget proposed to inflict two substantial tax increases on U.S. corporations with global operations. One would make it more expensive to bring cash from those operations into the U.S. The other would make it expensive (on average 30% more expensive) to pay Americans, rather than citizens of any other country, to perform headquarters administrative jobs such as accounting, IT, or HR. These proposals were supposedly aimed at fulfilling the promise to “end tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas”. While they hurt companies with global operations, it is hard to see how they would do anything other than reduce U.S. jobs.

This is the epitome of 21st Century military industrial legalistic doublespeak nightmare:

Jamie Leigh Jones was a 20-year-old Halliburton employee in 2005 when she was sent to work in Iraq. She'd been there just four days when she joined a small group of Halliburton firefighters outside her barracks at the end of the day. One of them gave her a drink. She took two sips, and Jones says that was the last thing she remembered.

"I woke up inside the barracks," she says. "It was actually inside my barrack room, and that's when I noticed I had been severely beaten and was actually naked."

Jones had been raped, repeatedly. By how many men, she's not sure. But she says one man was still naked and asleep in the room when she came to.
...
Jones was escorted by security to the company clinic for a rape examination. When the rape kit examination was done, the evidence was turned over to Halliburton security.

The young woman's breasts were so badly mauled that she is permanently disfigured. It has been four years since the attack, and despite the physical and circumstantial evidence, the Department of Justice has declined to investigate.
...
Heather Browne, director of communications at KBR, says that while the company can't speak to the facts since the case is ongoing, it denies any liability in the attack. And she argues that any dispute with Jones, even one involving charges of rape, must go to arbitration.

So Jones is now going to court seeking the right to sue. She has become one of the nation's leading arbitration reform advocates.

The powerful acid of corporatization has utterly eroded our basic legal rights. It took centuries of struggle and bloodshed to establish the legal tradition beginning with English common law, the Magna Carta and culminating in the U.S. Bill of Rights.

We are watching that legal framework vanish before our eyes.

globeSt.com - NEW YORK CITY-The nation’s construction industry is seeing unemployment figures approach 21% as the economic drought continues to stall new real estate development across the country. Putting the potential magnitude into more local perspective, in New York City, the construction industry employs 123,000 with average payrolls at $14 billion--second only behind health care according to the NY Building Congress.
Nationwide, the job losses are a reflection of steep declines in an industry that saw $548.1 billion in construction starts or 14% fewer than 2008 according to information from McGraw Hill Construction’s "Outlook ’09, Spring Update" report.

Yesterday the Chicago window workers' sit-in looked like it was gaining momentum - national press, a huge deal, an icon of a nation whose economy is parked in free fall as companies get denied the credit lines needed to keep rolling debts over. Now, that demonstration is off the news.

Today, former Democratic Alabama governor Don Siegelman's appeals case started: he got yanked out of office, convicted in a faulty process by the corrupt local U.S. Attorney's office, and tossed in prison. Siegelman also off the news.

I didn’t go to “Netroots Nation”, mainly because I can’t afford to travel to Austin right now. If I could have gone, I would have, if only to raise questions that the other so-called “Progressives” won’t ask. You see, I have quite a different “take” on things that most “Progressives” accept as business as usual in politics.

The difference between the people attending “Netroots” and myself is that I don’t trust the Democrats as much as I don’t trust the Republicans. Of course, being a realist, we have to accept that the Republican and Democratic Party duopoly will continue to keep the power in Washington. There is no real threat or challenge to them. The thing that bothers me the most however, is how quickly and totally the members of “Netroots” fall on their swords for Obama, even after he voted FOR telecom immunity on the FISA Bill. This type of behavior enables the politicians to take the Left for granted.

Spengler

Two events on June 6 might denote the death of the "slacker" as an American cultural archetype. The first was the largest monthly jump in the US unemployment rate in two decades, due to an unexpectedly large number of young entrants into the labor market. The second was the release of the film Kung Fu Panda, which transposes the ubiquitous slacker-makes-good story line into the incongruous setting of Chinese martial arts.

America might be the first country in recorded history whose culture celebrates not only indolence but also the sheer absence of ability. Byronic loafing is the birthright of genius, but slacking has become the entitlement of every young American.

American popular culture puts a special premium on doing nothing, which is what the protagonists of such popular television series as Friends, Sex in the City, The Office and Seinfeld did. Aristocrats throughout history loafed because they could afford to. Until very recently, so could Americans. That has come to a sudden and ignoble end, on which more later. more

Marianne Kolbasuk McGee | April 2

Information Week - Thousands of employers are scrambling this week to file H-1B visa petitions in hopes that the U.S. government will approve their applications to hire foreign tech workers in fiscal 2009. InformationWeek analyzed the list of companies that had their H-1B visa applications approved last year and the number of approvals they got.

Among the top 10 companies having H-1B visa petitions approved by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for fiscal 2007 (which started Oct. 1, 2006) are eight Indian firms -- with Infosys ranked at No. 1 with 4,559 visas -- and two U.S.-based companies, Microsoft and Intel, having a combined 1,328 visa petitions approved. In total, the top 10 companies had 12,876 H-1B visa petitions approved.

Christopher S. Rugabear | Washington | April 3

AP - The battle over patent reform, a sleepy sounding subject that affects new, cheaper medicines, Chinese counterfeits and BlackBerry addicts, has always sent high-tech companies and drugmakers to their respective corners.

But now organized labor is getting in the fight, using its lobbying muscle to stop -- or at least shape -- proposed changes to patent law.

Spurred by concern about overseas piracy of U.S. goods, unions have stepped up their opposition to patent reform legislation pending in the Senate. The AFL-CIO and the Change to Win coalition, a group of seven unions that includes the Teamsters, argued in separate letters recently that proposed reforms to the patent system would make it easier for competitors in China and India to counterfeit U.S. products and send more U.S jobs overseas.

Washington | March 27

BBC - More than 100 Indians who moved to the US for jobs have marched hundreds of miles to Washington DC in protest at being forced to work "like slaves".

The men plan to take their protest to the Indian ambassador.

The men say recruiters tricked them into paying up to $20,000 each for a new life in the US, where they then had to work in exploitative conditions.

The Mississippi firm that employed them, Signal International, has denied they were mistreated.

It says the men were paid wages above the local average and given good accommodation.

It accuses the recruitment firm of deceiving the Indians and has now ended its contract.

Erin Conroy | March 18

AP - Puzzling resumes: Career advisors have always said that your resume should stand out against the rest of the stack. But how much creativity should your cover letter ooze -- even when looking in creative fields?

A telephone questionnaire of about 250 people by online job search company Creative Group found that more than half of marketing executives and a quarter of advertising executives view unusual job-hunting tactics -- such as sending a potential employer a shoe "to get a foot in the door" -- as unprofessional.

Some examples the respondents gave of peculiar job seeking:

• One applicant sent six postcards, each a puzzle piece, which formed his resume.
• A candidate sent an egg carton with faux eggs and a message saying she delivered fresh ideas daily.
• A job hunter used an office building across the street to post his qualifications on a large sign.
• Another sent a baseball mitt and said he wanted to be part of the team.
• A woman printed her name on golf balls and sent them to executives that were hiring.

Rick Merritt | Bengaluru, India | March 17

EE Times - Wipro Ltd., one of India's largest outsourcing companies, is eyeing expansion in Europe and the U.S. as part of the next phase of globalization. The $5 billion IT services firm plans to open two new software development centers in the U.S. and is studying a sizable acquisition in technology R&D in Germany.

"We want to give our customers a choice of geography with a distributed network of low cost development centers close to their centers of operation," said Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro Ltd. in a presentation to members of the international press here.

Wipro already has two software development centers in the U.S. One in Troy, Mich., focuses on automotive systems. Its other software development center is in Atlanta.

(originally posted at The Seminal)

As Bill Richardson says, the U.S. has an immigration problem, but Mexico has one too.

"Free" trade deals like NAFTA devastated Mexico's domestic economy because these were unfair. Mexico gave up its protective tariffs on things like agricultural products while the U.S. didn't, meaning that food grown more cheaply in Mexico could not compete with American grown produce. NAFTA put over 2 million Mexican farmers out of business. This "free" trade agreement also allowed multi-national corporations like Walmart, fueled by even cheaper Chinese labor, to drive out thousands of small Mexican businesses and depress Mexican wages.

Mexico simply can't compete with places like China, so the American businesses that were supposed to set up shop in Mexico under NAFTA have largely moved on to cheaper locales. All this wonderful trade leaves Mexico with a glut of unemployed workers, mostly young men. These people then go looking for new jobs and a better life in the United States.

And they have little choice. While wages in Mexico fell 20% since 2001, immigrants can make as much as 13 times more in the U.S. It's not hard to see why some people would risk their lives to come to this country. You're talking about a 1300% pay raise!

Indeed, free trade and immigration go hand in hand. Free trade allows industry to take advantage of uneven prices in the global marketplace while at the same time forcing immigrants to take advantage of uneven wages. We are literally incentivizing illegal immigration. In the case of NAFTA, America gets the opportunity to sell our goods to Mexican consumers coupled with an influx of Mexican workers. Free trade means free movement of everything - goods, services, and labor.

There has been much talk lately about the state of the middle-class, the insecurity of workers, and the flat-lining of wages in America. Much of the debate has revolved around the changes in the make-up of our labor force today. It has been erroneously reported that the shrinking of wages and of the middle-class is due to our no longer being a manufacturing society and due to out-sourcing. While this provides a convenient foe, it does not accurately depict the situation. There is a direct correlation between the flat-lining wages and the shrinking middle-class with the reduction of the labor movement in America. The only groups who have seen real growth in wages the past few decades are groups who are represented by unions. If this is true, then why are unions and the labor movement not more powerful and vibrant?

Executive Summary

Is Organized Labor a Decaying Business Model? The answer is not a definitive yes or no, but rather yes and no. If organized labor continues in the same manner it has for the last century, then the probability of relevant existence in the next century is very slim, and labor will become the one-century wonder. Unions must accept the new paradigm, which is the nature of work is changing, and will continue to evolve. The economic forces of globalization are a major contributor to this evolution, as is the shift towards an internet based information society. The traditional blue-collar labor business model is being replaced with robotics, technology, outsourcing, and globalization.

There is a common myth that runs through America, propagated by the wealthy for mass consumption. This myth has been one of the most dangerous and divisive instruments used against the American working class of all races. This myth has been a part of Americana from the beginning and continues today unabated for the most part and constantly being reinforced by the media, corporate America, and the talking heads. The myth is simply this: that if an individual will work hard, follow the rules, and be patient that they can be successful. The biggest determinate to a person’s rise in this society is hard work and personal responsibility.

Verena Dobnik | New York | Nov 21

AP - A labor rights group alleged Tuesday that crucifixes sold in religious gift shops in the U.S. are produced under "horrific" conditions in a Chinese factory with more than 15-hour work days and inadequate food.

"It's a throwback to the worst of the garment sweatshops 10, 20 years ago," said Charles Kernaghan, director of the National Labor Committee.

Kernaghan held a news conference in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral to call attention to conditions at a factory in Dongguan, a southern Chinese city near Hong Kong, where he said crosses sold at the historic church and elsewhere are made.

LABOR DAY

By David Podvin

Another Labor Day has arrived, making it the perfect time to examine how American workers are victimized by those who pledge friendship. Conservatives never betray laborers, if only because it is impossible to betray people you openly despise. It is progressives who seduce the working class with false promises of fidelity.

In recent decades, American workers have seen their wages steadily lose ground to inflation while the monied elite have prospered. The national distribution of wealth now skews higher than ever, the byproduct of tax policies and trade agreements and illegal immigration. Conservatives have faithfully promoted the interests of the GOP’s aristocratic benefactors while liberals have failed to represent the peasants who vote Democratic.

JORDAN ROBERTSON | SAN FRANCISCO | September 1

AP - The Bush administration can go ahead with a pilot program to allow as many as 100 Mexican trucking companies to freely haul their cargo anywhere within the U.S. for the next year, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied a request made by the Teamsters union, the Sierra Club and the nonprofit Public Citizen to halt the program.

The appeals court ruled the groups have not satisfied the legal requirements to immediately stop what the government is calling a "demonstration project," but can continue to argue their case.

The trucking program is scheduled to begin Thursday.

Teamsterpower at the Daily Kos asks, "Can You Be a "Progressive Capitalist" and Anti-Union?"

No, you can't.

I worked in finance for ten years. Finance and the markets don't care for unions, only for siphoning from the wealth that labor creates.

One must have a respect for both capital and labor--and labor needs unions, otherwise it will always be exploited. Capital will always screw labor, at any time, in any place, in any way possible.

Marx wasn't wrong about everything.

In the mid-1970s the TV sitcom The Jeffersons portrayed the rags-to-riches story of a black entrepreneur living the American Dream. The pugnacious and overbearing George Jefferson (former neighbor of All in the Family’s Archie Bunker) becomes a dry cleaning magnate and leaves blue-collar Queens for swanky Manhattan. As the show’s theme song recounts:

“Well we’re moving on up,
To the east side.
To a deluxe apartment in the sky.
Moving on up,
To the east side.
We finally got a piece of the pie.”

But now fast-forward to 2007 and real world America. When it comes to those deluxe apartments in the sky, today’s exclusive penthouses sit atop much taller high-rises--but the chances of ever living in one (or even breathing its rarified air as a dinner guest) have shrunk considerably. And although the proverbial economic pie is much larger today as well, a relative handful of gluttons are gorging themselves while everyone else settles for leftovers and crumbs.

Ian references Kevin Phillip's work in The View From There, so I thought I'd try and explain it a bit.

Kevin Phillip's monumental tome Wealth and Democracy talks about, among other things, the lifecycle of an economic empire. He analyzes the Spanish, Dutch, English and American empires in great depth and finds many things in common. The latter three were all industrial empires. The Spanish empire was based on bringing home the spoils of conquest, so it has a slightly different cycle (though it ends the same way), and I'll ignore it here.

Continued after the jump and well worth reading. ~eds.

Thanks team agonist for inviting the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy to guest blog on the immigration bill!

The question of the week is- how would the Senate's new immigration bill, the proposed "Grand Bargain" for immigration reform impact America's middle class and everyone working their way into the middle class? DMI applied our famed two-part litmus test that we use to grade proposed immigration legislation to this latest bill to evaluate its impact on the current and aspiring middle class.

It didn't earn the kind of grades you'd like to take home at the end of the school year, that's for sure.

Leslie Miller | February 23

AP - The news that Mexican trucks will be allowed to haul freight deeper into the United States drew an angry reaction Friday from labor leaders, safety advocates and members of Congress.

They said Mexico has substandard trucks and low-paid drivers that will threaten national security, cost thousands of jobs and endanger motorists on the northern side of the Mexican border.

The Bush administration on Thursday announced its plan to have U.S. inspectors oversee Mexican trucking companies that carry cargo across the border.