Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): February 22, 2018 Marcie Smith, adjunct econ professor at John Jay College (CUNY), on the recently departed Gene Sharp, revered but problematic theorist of nonviolence and friend of the intelligence services
Smaller strikes also in decline
Several readers responded to the recent post on strikes by asking if the BLS stats, which cover stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers, are missing smaller-scale actions. (And I should say that I’m being imprecise by calling all stoppages “strikes,” since the figures also include lockouts.) Alas, no. The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service publishes data on all work stoppages, regardless of the number of workers involved. The numbers from 1984 through 2016 are graphed below. Smaller strikes peaked at 1,142 in 1985, which looks big by recent standards. If the trajectory… Read More
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): February 15, 2018 Max Sawicky on Trump’s budget • Edward Luce, Financial Times columnist and author of The Retreat of Western Liberalism, on the crisis of the American class system
The disappearing strike
According to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures released this morning, last year saw the second-smallest number of major strikes in recorded history: seven. This is close to the record low set in 2009, five—in the depths of the Great Recession, when the unemployment rate was approaching 10%. Last year’s average unemployment rate was less than half that, 4.3%. Here’s the grim history of the decline of labor’s most powerful weapon in two graphs: The number of days of “idleness”—a curiously moralizing word for an instrument of class struggle—wasn’t as close to a… Read More
Fresh audio product
Just posted to my radio archive (click on date for link): February 8, 2018 DH on stock market madness (longer version is here) • Yasha Levine, author of Surveillance Valley, on the military/intelligence roots of the internet, which live on today (hi NSA!)
About that stock panic
Stock markets have stabilized, at least for now, after a few days of what the press likes to call “turmoil.” What does it all mean? There’s no doubt that stocks have been due for a comeuppance for some time: they’re very expensive. Since stocks represent claims on corporate profits, present and future, the conventional way to value them is by measuring their price against those underlying profits (or “earnings” in Wall Street lingo, since to the owning class, profits from capital are just like wages for labor: as they like to say,… Read More
Bosses getting raises, working stiffs not
Stock markets have been swooning, in no small part because last Friday’s U.S. employment report showed that average hourly earnings (AHE)—the average wage, excluding benefits, received by private sector workers—rose smartly in January. This prompted fears that inflationary pressures are mounting, wages will eat into profits, and the Federal Reserve might raise interest rates more aggressively than had been thought as recently as last Thursday. Or, as the New York Times put it in a headline, with its patented mix of dullness and alarm: What these scaremongers aren’t telling you is that it’s only bosses… Read More
Fresh audio product
Just uploaded to my radio archive (click on date for link): February 1, 2018 David Palumbo-Liu on the right-wing attacks on him and on academic freedom (the Stanford Politics article on the Thiel network is here) • Jodi Dean on how to think about Trump
LBO News from Doug Henwood 