There is an interesting article at the American Prospect, Jobs Report: Sagging Employment Rates.
Short story, workforce participation is dropping at the same time that unemployment is dropping.
Slightly longer story: real unemployment is up, way up.
Longest story: go to article, it’s about 5-6 graphs.
Facing South has a a good analysis of how our real earnings compare to those of Europe:
Going back to the previous example of combined employer and employee income and “social security” taxes, here’s the same example with only the employee’s portion, i.e. take-home pay after payroll deductions:
Take-home pay, $50,000 income (USD) US France UK Payroll Tax $3750 $4500 $4352 Income Tax $6945 $7915 $8156 Take-home $39,305 $37,585 $37,492 So the British and the French take home a little less and pay a little more in VAT, but their health care is fully covered (the French employee is still paying the 8% for 100% coverage). The American employee still has to pay for health insurance (anywhere from $600 to $3000 per year in payroll deductions depending on the type of policy and company size), and most also pay additional state and local income taxes (for example, approx. $2500 in Georgia, $3000 in North Carolina, or $3900 in NYC).
Not only is he missing the whole safety net, but also the fact that a car is a luxury in places like the UK and France, where a good mass transit system exists, but a necessity in the US.
Additionally, you have far fewer worker protections here.
We spend more, but that’s because we are in debt up to our eyeballs.
I’m a strictly amateur blogger. I support my family as an engineer. I don’t need your money, but there are a lot of talented and highly educated people who live on the hairy edge of poverty blogging.
Phoenix Woman, who I’ve known since our Table Talk days, gives a good reason as to why:
The reason that there are so many great bloggers is that there are so many highly-educated, highly-talented throwaways. People who for reasons of cost, or health, or because their conscience was better than their management’s have been stripped of their jobs, replaced by foreigners, sent into humiliated exile in their own land. And, again, this is by plan. The H1-B (and other visas) have been used to drive down American wages and working conditions. The oversupply of scientists, engineers, and other highly-skilled people is deliberate, bipartisan, and planned at the highest levels of government.
The conventional wisdom for the past 25 years has been cheap labor economics, and the subsistance level bloggers are just one symptom of people who have done what the conventional wisdom says to do, and have been shafted as a result.
While free trade is a good thing in the abstract, a bad free trade deal is worse than no free trade deal.
Let me get this straight. This snake oil salesman gets fired over his financial shenanigans, and Fannie Mae is told NEVER to hire him again, and they are still giving him stock options?
Would someone please throw this corrupt jerk in gaol?
Raines Sues OFHEO Over Stock
By David S. Hilzenrath
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 6, 2007; D01Former Fannie Mae chairman Franklin D. Raines has mounted a new challenge to the government’s power over the federally chartered mortgage funding company, arguing that regulators have no authority to delay his receipt of a $3.9 million stock award.
Raines sued regulators this week to get the shares released, and yesterday a federal judge scheduled a hearing on the question for July 16.
The fresh challenge comes as legislative efforts to give federal regulators more power over the company have stalled.
Raines is one of many current and former Fannie Mae executives who have been waiting to receive payouts pegged to the company’s performance from 2003 through 2006, including periods when Fannie Mae’s earnings were misstated and, regulators allege, the company was mismanaged.
Raines left the company after the Securities and Exchange Commission ordered it in 2004 to correct years of financial reports that overstated profit by billions of dollars. In reaching a $400 million settlement with regulators last year, Fannie Mae agreed never to employ Raines again.
As the company worked on straightening out its books, it delayed deciding how much stock its executives should receive under certain incentive plans. Last month, Fannie Mae’s board proposed releasing millions of dollars of awards — subject to approval by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight.
The agency has since sought more information from Fannie Mae about how it arrived at the amount of the awards and told the company to keep the payments on hold until it completes its review.
The agency has warned Fannie Mae that any stock awards it released “could prove irretrievable” and could leave the company liable if later found to be excessive, according to a document filed in court yesterday.
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This is not a farm impliment. It’s the non-nuclear alternative to neighborhood nuclear superiority.
Watch the vid, it’s funny as hell, and proof that Nesmith is a genius.
Danes tout flamethrower-packing robot ‘farmworker’
By Lewis Page
Published Thursday 5th July 2007 13:50 GMTDanish agro-boffins have developed a robot which appears at first sight to be a welcome diversion from the ongoing parade of deadly military slaughter machines.
“Hortibot“, brainchild of Scandinavian scientists led by Dr Rasmus Nyholm Jørgensen of Aarhus University, is supposedly a peaceful robot farmworker. It uses GPS to navigate itself around the fields, mowing, spraying, or doing other tiresome tasks while the human landowners fill in the subsidy forms.
Hortibot can even do the weeding, and not simply by spraying chemicals about. The Daily News of Ludington, Michigan, got the story when one of the Danish designers visited the States.
“Currently, the robot can identify approximately 25 different kinds of weeds,” according to the Michigan newshounds.
“Hortibot has a variety of weed-removing attachments and methods. It can manually pick weeds,” apparently.
This is good news indeed; at last, a faithful robot pal intended to toil away for the benefit of humanity rather than spying on people or eliminating them in an apocalyptic mechanised bloodbath.
But such foolish dreams of amity and between man and machine were swiftly unsettled. It seems that Hortibot also has other, more robust capabilities as well as its weed-picking apparatus. The agro-droid can also target its adversaries with “flames, or a laser”.
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“The labour problem will bring this in, when the government gets done with their immigration laws,” Schwass reportedly commented. He was no doubt referring to the US Border Patrol’s plan to install Eye-of-Sauron style scanner towers along the Mexican border in order to stand off the terrorists and huddled masses.
The FAA maintains that it was a pay increase, not a pay cut, but it looks like going back to the old contract would require $20m in back pay.
The FAA refused to negotiate in good faith with the union.
Controller Amendment Could Scuttle FAA Bill, Mica Says (Subscription Required)
Aviation Week & Space Technology
07/02/2007, page 37Adrian Schofield
WashingtonRepublicans say controller amendment could be ‘showstopper’ for FAA bill
Printed headline: Veto Bait
The juggernaut that is the FAA reauthorization effort has rolled past another congressional milestone, but in doing so it picked up a controversial amendment that threatens to draw a White House veto.
The House version of the FAA reauthorization bill was introduced June 27 –after many false starts–and was supported by both Republican and Democratic leaders from the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. However, this accord was short-lived: Just a day later Republicans vehemently opposed an amendment that would reopen an air traffic controller contract imposed by the FAA last year.
The amendment and the bill itself were eventually approved during a June 28 markup hearing, and are now headed for further debate on the House floor. The Senate passed its own version in May.
Rep. John Mica (Fla.), ranking Republican on the committee, stressed the controller clause will likely result in a presidential veto. This amendment is a “showstopper” and “a poison pill that could kill FAA reauthorization,” he said. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters later confirmed the veto threat.
The controller amendment–offered by aviation subcommittee Chairman Jerry Costello (D-Ill.)–would turn the clock back to before the FAA declared an impasse in negotiations with the controllers union. Under existing law, the impasse allowed the agency to impose its last contract proposal. The Costello amendment would send the FAA and the National Air Traffic Controllers Assn. (Natca) back to the bargaining table, and would require binding arbitration if no agreement is reached within 45 days.
Both sides agree the contract negotiation process needs to be changed in the future, but they differ over reopening the existing contract. Costello proposes reversing new pay and work rules imposed by the FAA last year, and awarding up to $20 million in back pay to controllers. However, he noted the amendment would be void if the FAA and Natca manage to reach a settlement before the reauthorization bill reaches the President.
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£50k a year? That’s almost $100K US. I’d be willing to edit a “Lad Mag” for that.
My wife might object though.
Of more interest is that even in “Free Market” Britain, there are more worker protections than in the US.
Porn mag ed sacked for inadequate smut
Men Only ‘artistic differences’ kerfuffle
By Lester Haines → More by this author
Published Tuesday 12th June 2007 16:18 GMT
Why Businesses need Business Continuity – Free whitepaperMobile computing: Opportunities and risk – Free whitepaperThe former editor of Men Only has won an industrial tribunal for unfair dismissal after being shown the door for refusing requests to use younger models and “bigger and more graphic photos”, The Evening Standard reports.
Pierre Perrone, 49, fell out with owner Paul Raymond’s nephew, Mark Quinn, over the former’s decision to target the grumble mag at “discerning older gentlemen”. Perrone took the helm in 2004, when the publication’s circulation was in free-fall, pressured by net smut, hardcore imports, and “competition from lifestyle magazines such as FHM and GQ”.
He explained to the tribunal he “believed the title had become tired and he had tried to target the more discerning market, using slightly older models”. Quinn was unimpressed, and “repeatedly ordered him to replace the chosen models with younger-looking women” while offering “more explicit” content.
As a result, Mr Perrone said these “artistic differences led to him being demoted, then axed in a sham redundancy” from his £50k a year post. Paul Raymond Publications asserted that he’d been canned because of falling sales and was “genuinely redundant”.
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My comments will be in line.
Long Reviled, Merit Pay Gains Among Teachers
By SAM DILLON
MINNEAPOLIS — For years, the unionized teaching profession opposed few ideas more vehemently than merit pay, but those objections appear to be eroding as school districts in dozens of states experiment with plans that compensate teachers partly based on classroom performance.
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Minnesota’s $86 million teacher professionalization and merit pay initiative has spread to dozens of the state’s school districts, and it got a lift this month when teachers voted overwhelmingly to expand it in Minneapolis. A major reason it is prospering, Gov. Tim Pawlenty said in an interview, is that union leaders helped develop and sell it to teachers.
“As a Republican governor, I could say, ‘Thou shalt do this,’ and the unions would say, ‘Thou shalt go jump in the lake,’ ” Mr. Pawlenty said. “But here they partnered with us.”
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“It’s looking like there’s a critical mass,” Professor Odden said. The movement to experiment with teacher pay, he added, “is still not ubiquitous, but it’s developing momentum.”
Some plans still run into strong opposition from teachers and their unions, as in Texas and Florida this year, where skeptical teachers rejected proposals from school districts. An incentive-pay proposal by Chancellor Joel I. Klein of the New York City public schools has stalled, with city officials and the teachers’ union blaming each other.
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Merit pay, or compensating teachers for classroom performance rather than their years on the job and coursework completed, found some support in the 1980s among policy makers and school administrators, who saw it as a way to encourage good teachers to work harder and to weed out the bad ones. But teachers saw it as a gimmick used by principals to reward cronies based on favoritism.
And this is the crux of the matter. Teacher’s unions are so strident and aggressive because principals have no adult supervision.
I have experienced this with my own children, where a principal, either directly, or through coddling one fo their toadies, have cost the district with NO negative consequences.
The Department of Education is encouraging schools and districts to try merit pay. [Last week it awarded 18 new federal grants, building on 16 others distributed last November. That makes a total of $80 million that the Bush administration has given to schools and districts in 19 states that have incentive pay plans.] ……
This action has NOTHING to do with education, and EVERYTHING to do with politics.
Simply put, there is no Bush admin policy apparatus. Everything is political gain, and this is an attempt to weaken teacher’s unions.
The positions of the two national teachers’ unions diverge on merit pay. The National Education Association, the larger of the two, has adopted a resolution that labels merit pay, or any other pay system based on an evaluation of teachers’ performance, as “inappropriate.”
The American Federation of Teachers says it opposes plans that allow administrators alone to decide which teachers get extra money or that pay individual teachers based solely on how students perform on standardized test scores, which they consider unreliable. But it encourages efforts to raise teaching quality and has endorsed arrangements that reward teams of teachers whose students show outstanding achievement growth.
This is beacuse the NEA has delusions of grandeur, and see their labor union as secondary to their status as a “professional organization”.
Gee, you treat you employers and suppliers like crap, and we are supposed to be surprised when they rob you blind?
Payback is a bitch, huh.
Theft rising at U.S. Wal-Mart stores
Theft rising at U.S. Wal-Mart stores
June 14, 2007: 06:25 AM ESTJun. 14, 2007 (AFX International Focus) —
NEW YORK (AP) – businessminute
Shoppers at Wal-Mart stores (NYSE:WMT) across America are loading carts with merchandise — maybe a flat-screen TV, a few DVDs and a six-pack of beer — and strolling out without paying. Employees also are helping themselves to goods they haven’t paid for.The world’s largest retailer is saying little about these kinds of thefts, but its recent public disclosures that it is experiencing an increase in so-called shrinkage at its U.S. stores suggests that inventory losses due to shoplifting, employee theft, paperwork errors and supplier fraud could be worsening.
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