Unions continue to fade
After four years of relative stability, union membership resumed its decline in 2016, with overall and private sector membership at record lows, and public sector membership continuing to tumble. The glum story is told by the graph below. Stats released Thursday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) show that 10.7% of wage and salary workers were union members in 2016, down 0.4 point from 2015. Union density (the term of art) fell 0.3 point to 6.4% in the private sector, and 0.8 in the public, to 34.4%. Overall density is the lowest ever,… Read More
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive (date is link to show): January 26, 2017 Asad Haider, author of this, on the problems of “white privilege” discourse • Lucinda Rosenfeld, author of the new novel Class, on race and class in the world of Brooklyn public schools
Federal employment is already frozen
This morning, chief bloviator Donald Trump issued an executive order freezing federal hiring. Such a move probably appeals to those who think that the growth of government is “out of control.” That might be true in some senses—surveillance and the warfare state certainly qualify, but Trump only wants accelerate their growth. But one thing that doesn’t qualify is the subject of the order: federal employment. Graphed below are federal employment in thousands and as a percentage of total employment, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly survey of employers. The absolute number of federal employees at the end of… Read More
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive (date is link to shows): January 19, 2017 Yasha Levine on the politics of encryption • Elayne Tobin on celebrity (bibliography here)
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive (dates are links to shows): January 12, 2017 Nancy Fraser on “progressive neoliberalism,” feminism, Trump, and a way out of all this (see here, here, here, and here for more) December 29, 2016 Zahra Billoo on Donald Trump, the Muslim registry, and how to resist it • Andrew Cockburn on Russophobia December 22, 2016 Rania Khalek on Syria (new material) • George Joseph, author of this article, on Teach for America going global (rebroadcast of an interview that first ran in July)
On “working with” Julian Assange
A tendentious hack named Casey Michel slimes me in The Daily Beast for “maintain[ing] a professional relationship” with Julian Assange: Another Nation staple, contributing editor Doug Henwood, has maintained a professional relationship with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, yet is apparently very tetchy about the collaboration, as I also discovered when I engaged him. Henwood had planned to work with Assange on putting out a book about Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speeches – Henwood annotating, Assange writing the forward—transcripts of which were of course originally hacked by Russian intelligence and disseminated through WikiLeaks, at least according to 17 different… Read More
