Subjects Archives: Labor

Yesterday morning, the U.S. Department of Labor reported that, during the week ending last Saturday, another 1.4 million American workers filed initial claims for unemployment compensation.

At the highest of levels of unemployment following the 2007-08 crash, there were 15.3 million jobless Americans.

Jack Mundey, the leader of the NSW Builders Labourers’ Federation between 1968 and 1974 has passed away at the age of 90. An initiator of the “green bans”, Jack was a Marxist who rediscovered the ecological essence of Marxism.

That there are good and honorable people who believe that the Democratic Party can be turned around. I don’t. Our major task is to change the entire nature of political discussion in the country. In my view that’s just not going to happen within the Democratic Party.

In early May, Ohio Republican Governor Mike DeWine began reopening the state economy. And to support business and slash state expenses, both at worker expense, he had a “COVID-19 Fraud” form put up on the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services website where employers could confidentially report employees “who quit or refuse work when it is available due to COVID-19.”

All told, 38.6 million American workers have filed initial unemployment claims during the past nine weeks.

The World is in Their Care calls our awareness down upon those who do the daily work which improves, repairs, and sustains life. All labor is shared. Bless the listener without whom their is no poet. This poem is dedicated to Jerry Tucker.

Sarah Jones, in The Coronavirus Class War in New York Magazine, does a neat, tidy job of kneecapping the notion that the anti-lockdown protests are manned by workers who want to get back to their jobs so they can start making money again.

IN A PANDEMIC, “ESSENTIAL” LABORERS ARE WORKING, BUT THE LABOR MARKET ISN’T.

The war on labour is a continuation of the attacks which the BJP has been launching on the religious minorities and dalits; its economic consequences will be disastrous.

Sarah Jaffe, with co-journalist Michelle Chan, interviews U.S. workers of all stripes for their podcast “Belabored” for Dissent Magazine. The following interviews are excerpts from their series on COVID-19 stories, republished with permission.

More than a million Canadians lost their jobs in March, and an additional 800,000 had their paid hours reduced by over 50 per cent (Evans 2020). The recently released StatsCan Labour Force Survey (LFS) for April is the first government report to capture a full month’s worth of employment data since the start of the crisis.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ eagerly awaited Friday morning Official Unemployment Rate report for April—what editors generally call the BLS’s “headline” rate of unemployment—was definitely headline-worthy.

Universities can immediately bypass feckless state & federal legislatures & finance themselves directly with “Unis” supported by the Federal Reserve For a growing majority of outspoken administrators and faculty, the economic fallout associated with the Covid-19 crisis threatens to catapult U. S. higher education into a draconian age of austerity, layoffs, and closures. The question, […]

While there are great differences between the crises and political movements and possibilities of the 1930s and now, there are also important lessons that can be learned from the efforts of activists to build mass movements for social transformation during the Great Depression. My aim in this paper is to illuminate the challenges faced and choices made by these activists and draw out some of the relevant lessons for contemporary activists seeking to advance a Green New Deal.

In particular, the existence of a reserve army serves to discipline labor, keeping its wage demands in check, since employed workers are forced to compete with unemployed and underemployed workers for the available jobs.

In the absence of strong support measures by governments across the world, the estimated loss of mostly informal jobs would result in rising poverty, starvation and inequality, an ILO report says.

Newly released data from the Boston Public Health Commission (BPHC) show that COVID-19 is present at higher rates in certain Boston communities, including Hyde Park, Mattapan, Dorchester, and East Boston.

In the U.S., Covid-19 unfolds with temporal and spatial unevenness. The health system barely has the necessary resources to handle normal operations, let alone a pandemic.

All told, more than 16 million American workers have filed initial claims during the past three weeks.