Smlr_net November 2010

smlr_net@email.rutgers.edu

3 participants
72 discussions

NYTimes.com: Clyde Summers, Advocate of Labor Union Democracy, Is Dead at 91
by ciudadviejo＠yahoo.com 12 Nov '10

12 Nov '10

This page was sent to you by: ciudadviejo(a)yahoo.com. BUSINESS DAY | November 12, 2010 Clyde Summers, Advocate of Labor Union Democracy, Is Dead at 91 By STEVEN GREENHOUSE Mr. Summers, a law professor, played a role in writing the 1959 federal law that guaranteed democratic rights to union members. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/12/business/12summers.html?emc=eta1 ---------------------------------------------------------- ABOUT THIS E-MAIL This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service. For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help(a)nytimes.com. NYTimes.com 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018 Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

1 0

[IWS] COLLECTIVE BARGAINING IN A TIME OF CRISIS (GUSTO WP6 Working Paper--September 2010)
by Eugene McElroy 12 Nov '10

12 Nov '10

GUSTO WP6 Working Paper--September 2010 *Collective Bargaining in a Time of Crisis* Vera Glassner (ETUI), Maarten Keune (AIAS – University of Amsterdam) and Paul Marginson (IRRU - University of Warwick) http://www.gusto-project.eu/images/gusto/WP6/wp6001v1cbandcrisis.pdf [full-text, 31 pages] [excerpt] 1. Introduction The magnitude of the deterioration in economic conditions since mid-2008, and the consequences for employment and employment conditions, are unprecedented in the post-war era in western Europe. Likewise, they are unknown in central and south-east Europe since the economic upheaval that accompanied the post-communist transition twenty years ago. In the present paper we consider the capacity of collective negotiators across the EU to frame and agree measures which respond to the challenges thrown up by the financial and economic crisis. Three main questions arise. First, what has been the incidence and character of negotiated responses at different, inter-sector, sector and company, levels? The prominence or otherwise of collectively agreed measures provides a critical indication of the continued robustness of collective bargaining as a central mode of labour market governance in (most of) Europe’s social models. The character of agreements refers to the substantive measures, in the form of collective goods, provided as protection against uncertainty, but also to the (re)distribution of uncertainty involved and to procedural innovations. Second, what factors influence the cross-country and cross-sector pattern in terms of the incidence and the nature of crisis-response agreements? Four types of factors will be posited as potentially relevant: economic conditions; public policy; industrial relations institutions; and employer and trade union strategies. Third, what might be the medium-term implications of the crisis, both substantively and procedurally, for collective bargaining? The impact of the crisis may have served to reinforce existing trajectories, towards greater prominence of employment as a focus of substantive trade-offs (Léonard, 2001) and, procedurally, towards greater decentralisation of collective bargaining (Marginson and Sisson, 2004; Visser, 2005), or it may have prompted new directions of travel. In addressing these questions, the paper focuses on crisis-related developments in collective bargaining in the private sector across the EU since the onset of the crisis during 2008. The agreements, and unsuccessful negotiations, that it considers take one of two forms: specific agreements, or negotiations, aimed at tackling the effects of the economic downturn; and crisis response measures adopted as part of ‘regular’ collective agreements, or negotiations on pay and/or other matters. The public sector will be addressed only briefly (see Box 1 in the Annex). The austerity measures aimed at scaling back public deficits embraced by most EU member states in the opening half of 2010, although rather earlier by some including Ireland, Hungary and the Baltic States, carry major consequences for employment and employment conditions in the public sector. However, implementation is still at an early phase in many countries and the specific nature of the consequences, and therefore the issues to be dealt with by collective negotiators, is as yet not fully clear. The paper’s analysis is cross-nationally and cross-sectorally comparative. Whilst being alert to innovations in the substance of agreements and in procedural arrangements, the data available preclude a systematic comparison over time. Empirically, the paper draws on two reviews and analysis of secondary sources already undertaken by, respectively, two of the authors and the third working jointly with another colleague1 (Glassner and Keune, 2010; Carley and Marginson, 2010; Marginson and Carley, 2010). A detailed empirical account of crisis-induced developments in private sector collective bargaining across the EU will not be presented here. Instead, readers are referred to these two sources. Examples of particular agreements will be used to illustrate the paper’s arguments. **************************************** Stuart Basefsky Director, IWS News Bureau Institute for Workplace Studies Cornell/ILR School 16 E. 34th Street, 4th Floor New York, NY 10016 Telephone: (607) 255-2703 Fax: (607) 255-9641 E-mail: smb6(a)cornell.edu **************************************** -- Eugene McElroy Library Associate School of Management and Labor Relations SMLR Library Rutgers University 50 Labor Center Way New Brunswick, NJ 08901 (732) 932-9513

1 0

NYTimes.com: For Women, Diploma Doesn't Mean a Career
by ciudadviejo＠yahoo.com 11 Nov '10

11 Nov '10

This page was sent to you by: ciudadviejo(a)yahoo.com. WORLD | November 11, 2010 For Women, Diploma Doesn't Mean a Career By SARA HAMDAN High university graduation rates for women in the Gulf states are not necessarily translating into private sector jobs. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/world/middleeast/11iht-m11women.html?emc=… ---------------------------------------------------------- ABOUT THIS E-MAIL This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service. For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help(a)nytimes.com. NYTimes.com 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018 Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

1 0

NYTimes.com: Grandparents' Role Grows as the Economy Struggles
by ciudadviejo＠yahoo.com 11 Nov '10

11 Nov '10

This page was sent to you by: ciudadviejo(a)yahoo.com. U.S. | November 11, 2010 Grandparents' Role Grows as the Economy Struggles By SABRINA TAVERNISE The census found that the number of stay-at-home mothers declined as more children began living with their grandparents. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/us/11marriage.html?emc=eta1 ---------------------------------------------------------- ABOUT THIS E-MAIL This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service. For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help(a)nytimes.com. NYTimes.com 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018 Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

1 0

NYTimes.com: Shifting Health Costs to High Earners
by ciudadviejo＠yahoo.com 09 Nov '10

09 Nov '10

This page was sent to you by: ciudadviejo(a)yahoo.com. BUSINESS DAY | November 10, 2010 Shifting Health Costs to High Earners By REED ABELSON As costs rise, employers are shifting the burden of health care contributions to workers in top salary brackets. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/business/10insure.html?emc=eta1 ---------------------------------------------------------- ABOUT THIS E-MAIL This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service. For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help(a)nytimes.com. NYTimes.com 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018 Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

1 0

Job growth improves, but pace leaves full employment 20 years away
by Eugene McElroy 09 Nov '10

09 Nov '10

October’s employment report, released this morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed faster private sector employment growth than in recent months, 159,000, along with strong upward revisions to earlier data (+110,000). Other positive news was the unexpectedly modest jobs loss in state and local government (-7,000), although job losses in this sector will likely worsen in future months given state and local budget challenges. Even though October’s job growth is a step in the right direction, given the backlog of 14.8 million unemployed workers in this country, the pace of job growth is not strong enough to bring the unemployment rate down to pre-recession levels anytime soon. To give this some context: * If the rate of job growth were to continue at October’s rate, the economy would achieve prerecession unemployment rates (5% in December 2007) in roughly 20 years. * For the fourth straight month, the unemployment rate held steady at 9.6% more: http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/job_growth_improves_but_pace_leaves_f… -- Eugene McElroy Library Associate School of Management and Labor Relations SMLR Library Rutgers University 50 Labor Center Way New Brunswick, NJ 08901 (732) 932-9513

1 0

Facebook and Labor Law
by Eugene McElroy 09 Nov '10

09 Nov '10

Facebook has given us a twofer today, with two recent labor law cases dealing with the Internet social media site. In the first, the NLRB has filed a complaint against an employer alleging that it illegally fired an employee for criticizing her supervisor on Facebook. The Board also challenged the employer's policies that prohibited employees from depicting the employer “in any way” on social media sites and prohibited disparaging comments about co-workers or superiors. Although anything with Facebook is certainly going to catch interest, I'm not sure this is a "ground-breaking case." <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/business/09facebook.html?_r=1&hp>Acting GC Solomon puts it nicely in his description (from the NY Times): more: http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/laborprof_blog/2010/11/facebook-and-labor-… -- Eugene McElroy Library Associate School of Management and Labor Relations SMLR Library Rutgers University 50 Labor Center Way New Brunswick, NJ 08901 (732) 932-9513

1 0

How unemployment insurance creates jobs
by Eugene McElroy 09 Nov '10

09 Nov '10

Two million unemployed workers are at risk of losing their unemployment insurance benefits before the end of the year. Earlier this year, EPI asked a panel of experts about the value of unemployment insurance. http://www.epi.org/analysis_and_opinion/entry/how_unemployment_insurance_cr… -- Eugene McElroy Library Associate School of Management and Labor Relations SMLR Library Rutgers University 50 Labor Center Way New Brunswick, NJ 08901 (732) 932-9513

1 0

NYTimes.com: Company Accused of Firing Over Facebook Post
by ciudadviejo＠yahoo.com 09 Nov '10

09 Nov '10

This page was sent to you by: ciudadviejo(a)yahoo.com. BUSINESS DAY | November 09, 2010 Company Accused of Firing Over Facebook Post By STEVEN GREENHOUSE The National Labor Relations Board said a company fired an employee illegally after she criticized her supervisor. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/business/09facebook.html?emc=eta1 ---------------------------------------------------------- ABOUT THIS E-MAIL This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service. For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help(a)nytimes.com. NYTimes.com 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018 Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

1 0

Slate Article: The United States of Inequality
by mcelroy＠work.rutgers.edu 08 Nov '10

08 Nov '10

<http://imp.constantcontact.com/imp/cmp.jsp?impcc=IMP_143029301437223&o= http://img.constantcontact.com/lp/images/standard/spacer.gif> <http://altfarm.mediaplex.com/ad/ck/14302-93014-3722-3?mpt=21349794316?> <http://altfarm.mediaplex.com/ad/tr/14302-93014-3722-3?mpt=21349794316?> eugene has sent you an article from Slate Magazine <http://www.slate.com> . <http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/slate.newsletter/emailafriend;kw=emailaf riend;ad=lb;sz=728x90;tile=1;ord=7100> Where do I stand? Enter your zip code and income to find out where you fall on the curve. Zipcode: Income: How you compare: Average income in zipcode: Median income in state: Median income in country: $52,059 Percentile in country: Sources: American Community Survey <http://www.census.gov/prod/2009pubs/acsbr08-2.pdf> (State and National Data), IncomeTaxList <http://www.incometaxlist.com/> (Zip code data). NOTE: All information you enter is private and will not be recorded or stored in any way. A more thoughtful version of the income-doesn't-matter argument surfaces in my former Slate colleague Mickey Kaus' 1992 book The End of Equality <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465098290?ie=UTF8&tag=slatmaga-20&lin kCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0465098290> . Kaus chided "Money Liberals" for trying to redistribute income when instead they might be working to diminish social inequality by creating or shoring up spheres in which rich and poor are treated the same. Everybody can picnic in the park. Everybody should be able to receive decent health care. Under a compulsory national service program, everybody would be required to perform some civilian or military duty. As a theoretical proposition, Kaus' vision is appealing. Bill Gates will always have lots more money than me, no matter how progressive the tax system becomes. But if he gets called to jury duty he has to show up, just like me. When his driver's license expires, he'll be just as likely to have to take a driving test. Why not expand this egalitarian zone to, say, education, by making public schools so good that Gates' grandchildren will be as likely to attend them as mine or yours? But at a practical level, Kaus' exclusive reliance on social equality is simply inadequate. For one thing, the existing zones of social equality are pretty circumscribed. Neither Gates nor I spend a lot of time hanging around the Department of Motor Vehicles. Rebuilding or creating the more meaningful spheres—say, public education or a truly national health care system—won't occur overnight. Nurturing the social-equality sphere isn't likely to pay off for a very long time. Kaus would like to separate social equality from income equality, but the two go hand in hand. In theory they don't have to, but in practice they just do. Among industrialized nations, those that have achieved the greatest social equality are the same ones that have achieved the greatest income equality. France, for example, has a level of income inequality much lower <http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/45/24/41525323.pdf> than that of most other countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It's one of the very few places where income inequality has been going down. (Most everywhere else it's gone up, though nowhere to the degree it has in the United States.) France also enjoys what the World Health Organization calls the world's finest <http://www.who.int/whr/2000/media_centre/press_release/en/> health care system (by which the WHO means, in large part, the most egalitarian one; this is the famous survey from 2000 in which the U.S. ranked 37th). Do France's high marks on both social equality and income equality really strike you as a coincidence? As incomes become more unequal, a likelier impulse among the rich isn't to urge or even allow the government to create or expand public institutions where they can mix it up with the proles. It's to create or expand private institutions that will help them maintain separation from the proles, with whom they have less and less in common. According to Jonathan Rowe, who has written extensively about social equality, that's exactly what's happening in the United States. In an essay titled "The Vanishing Commons" that appeared in Inequality Matters <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1565849957?ie=UTF8&tag=slatmaga-20&lin kCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1565849957> , a 2005 anthology, Rowe notes that Congress has been busy extending copyright terms and patent monopolies and turning over public lands to mining and timber companies for below-market fees." In an 'ownership' society especially," Rowe writes, "we should think about what we own in common, not just what we keep apart." Inequality doesn't create unhappiness. Arthur C. Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, argued this point <http://www.aei.org/article/102127> in National Review online in June. What drives entrepreneurs, he wrote, is not the desire for money but the desire for earned success. When people feel they deserve their success, they are happy; when they do not, they aren't. "The money is just the metric of the value that the person is creating." Brooks marshaled very little evidence to support his argument, and what evidence he did muster was less impressive than he thought. He made much of a 1996 survey that asked people how successful they felt, and how happy. Among the 45 percent who counted themselves "completely successful" or "very successful," 39 percent said they were very happy. Among the 55 percent who counted themselves at most "somewhat successful," only 20 percent said they were happy. Brooks claimed victory with the finding that successful people were more likely to be happy (or at least to say they were), by 19 percentage points, than less-successful people. More striking, though, was that 61 percent of the successful people—a significant majority—did not say they were "very happy." Nowhere in the survey were the successful people asked whether they deserved their happiness. Let's grant Brooks his generalization that people who believe they deserve their success are likelier to be happy than people who believe they don't. It makes intuitive sense. But Brooks' claim that money is only a "metric" does not. Looking at the same survey data <http://www.russellsage.org/publications/workingpapers/moneymorale/docum ent> , Berkeley sociologist Michael Hout found that from 1973 to 2000 the difference between the affluent and the poor who counted themselves either "very happy" or "not too happy" ranged from 19 percentage points to 27. Among the poor, the percentage who felt "very happy" fell by nearly one-third from 1973 to 1994, then crept up a couple of points during the tight labor market of the late 1990s. Hout also observed that overall happiness dropped a modest 5 percent from 1973 to 2000. Quality of life is improving. This argument has been made by too many conservatives to count. Yes, it's true that an unemployed steelworker living in the 21st century is in many important ways better off than the royals and aristocrats of yesteryear. Living conditions improve over time. But people do not experience life as an interesting moment in the evolution of human societies. They experience it in the present and weigh their own experience against that of the living. Brooks cites (even though it contradicts his argument) a famous 1998 study <http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V8F-3V5MPT8-V/2/93289950 8dc2d3b7e8ad2a74d1513968> by economists Sara Solnick (then at the University of Miami, now at the University of Vermont) and David Hemenway of the Harvard School of Public Health. Subjects were asked which they'd prefer: to earn $50,000 while knowing everyone else earned $25,000, or to earn $100,000 while knowing everyone else earned $200,000. Objectively speaking, $100,000 is twice as much as $50,000. Even so, 56 percent chose $50,000 if it meant that would put them on top rather than at the bottom. We are social creatures and establish our expectations relative to others <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6EKK9XQ_J0> . Inequality isn't increasing. This is the boldest line of conservative attack, challenging a consensus about income trends in the United States that most conservatives accept. (Brooks <http://www.aei.org/article/102127> : "It is factually incorrect to argue that income inequality has not risen in America—it has.") Alan Reynolds, a senior fellow at Cato, made the case in a January 2007 paper <http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa586.pdf> . It was a technical argument hinging largely on a critique of the tax data used by Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty in the groundbreaking paper <http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/piketty-saezOUP04US.pdf> we looked at in our installment about the superrich. But as Gary Burtless of Brookings noted in a January 2007 reply <http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/papers/2007/0111useconomics_b urtless/20070111.pdf> , Social Security records "tell a simple and similar story." A Congressional Budget Office analysis <http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/77xx/doc7718/EffectiveTaxRates.pdf> , Burtless wrote, addressed "almost all" of Reynolds' objections to Saez and Piketty's findings, and confirmed "a sizable rise in both pre-tax and after-tax inequality." Reynolds' paper didn't deny notable increases in top incomes, but he argued that these were because of technical changes in tax law and/or to isolated and unusual financial events. That, Burtless answered, was akin to arguing that, "adjusting for the weather and the season, no homeowner in New Orleans ended up with a wet basement" after Hurricane Katrina. That income inequality very much matters is the thesis of the 2009 book The Spirit Level <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1608190366?ie=UTF8&tag=slatmaga-20&lin kCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1608190366> , by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, two medical researchers based in Yorkshire. The book has been criticized for overreaching <http://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.com/> . Wilkinson and Pickett relate income inequality trends not only to mental and physical health, violence, and teenage pregnancy, but also to global warming. But their larger point—that income inequality is bad not only for people on the losing end but also for society at large—seems hard to dispute. "Modern societies," they write, will depend increasingly on being creative, adaptable, inventive, well-informed and flexible communities, able to respond generously to each other and to needs wherever they arise. These are characteristics not of societies in hock to the rich, in which people are driven by status insecurities, but of populations used to working together and respecting each other as equals. The United States' economy is currently struggling to emerge from a severe recession brought on by the financial crisis of 2008. Was that crisis brought about by income inequality? Some economists are starting to think it may have been. David Moss of Harvard Business School has produced an intriguing chart <http://www.people.hbs.edu/dmoss/Bank%20Failures,%20Regulation,%20and%20 Inequality%20-%20Chart%20with%20Comments%20(David%20Moss,%20August%20201 0).pdf> that shows bank failures tend to coincide with periods of growing income inequality. "I could hardly believe how tight the fit was," he told <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/weekinreview/22story.html?_r=1> the New York Times. Princeton's Paul Krugman has similarly been considering <http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/inequality_crises.pdf> whether the Great Divergence helped cause the recession by pushing middle-income Americans into debt. The growth of household debt has followed a pattern strikingly similar to the growth in income inequality (see the final graph <http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/inequality_crises.pdf> ). Raghuram G. Rajan, a business school professor at the University of Chicago, recently argued <http://www.tnr.com/article/economy/77242/inequality-recession-credit-cr unch-let-them-eat-credit> on the New Republic's Web site that "let them eat credit" was "the mantra of the political establishment in the go-go years before the crisis." Christopher Brown, an economist at Arkansas State University, wrote a paper <http://www.clt.astate.edu/crbrown/brownrope.pdf> in 2004 affirming that "inequality can exert a significant drag on effective demand." Reducing inequality, he argued, would also reduce consumer debt. Today, Brown's paper looks prescient. Heightened partisanship in Washington and declining trust in government have many causes (and the latter slide predates <http://people-press.org/trust/> the Great Divergence). But surely the growing income chasm between the poor and middle class and the rich, between the Sort of Rich and the Rich, and even between the Rich and the Stinking Rich, make it especially difficult to reestablish any spirit of e pluribus unum. Republicans and Democrats compete to show which party more fervently opposes the elite, with each side battling to define what "elite" means. In a more equal society, the elite would still be resented. But I doubt that opposing it would be an organizing principle of politics to the same extent that it is today. I find myself returning to the gut-level feeling expressed at the start of this series: I do not wish to live in a banana republic. There is a reason why, in years past, Americans scorned societies starkly divided into the privileged and the destitute. They were repellent. Is it my imagination, or do we hear less criticism of such societies today in the United States? Might it be harder for Americans to sustain in such discussions the necessary sense of moral superiority? What is the ideal distribution of income in society? I couldn't tell you, and historically much mischief has been accomplished by addressing this question too precisely. But I can tell you this: We've been headed in the wrong direction for far too long. View a visual guide to inequality <javascript:void(window.open('http://www.slate.com/id/2266174/','_blank' ,' width=945, height=740, left=, top=, resizable=yes,status=yes,scrollbars=yes,'));> . Subscribe <http://feeds.feedburner.com/slate-great-divergence> to this series. Navigate <http://www.slate.com/id/2267157/> the series from a single page. Become a fan of Slate on Facebook <http://www.facebook.com/Slate> . Follow us on Twitter <http://twitter.com/Slate> . Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate. Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2266025/ © 2010 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

1 0

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

Smlr_net November 2010