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Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): January 31, 2019 Jamieson Webster, author of this article, on what we miss when we muffle our symptoms with psychiatric drugs • John Patrick Leary, author of Keywords, on the language of contemporary capitalism
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Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): January 24, 2019 Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of the Los Angeles teachers’ union and Jane McAlevey, author and organizer, on the union’s great victory in their LA strike, protecting public education against the plutocrats’ attacks
Union density update: back to 1900 levels
Sam Gindin pointed me to a history of private sector union density—the percent of workers belonging to unions—going back to 1900. (They’re credit to Troy and Sheflin’ Union Sourcebook, a standard source.) No doubt these numbers are more approximate than recent ones, but here’s a striking fact: 2018’s level, 6.4%, is a hair below 1900’s level, 6.5%. For simplicity’s sake, let’s just say they’re the same. Here’s an update of yesterday’s graph. Back where the 20th century started. That’s 118 years of progress for you.
Union density hits record low
Union density—the share of employed workers belonging to unions—fell to 10.5% in 2018, the lowest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began reporting the data in its modern form in 1964, down from 2017’s 10.7%. (See graph below.) After rising 0.1 point in 2017, private sector density fell back to match 2016’s 6.4%, the lowest since stats began in 1929. Republican governors’ war on public sector unions is having a visible effect: just 33.9% of government workers belonged to unions last year, the lowest since 1978, when membership was on an upswing—an… Read More
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Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): January 17, 2019 Andrew Bacevich tries to make sense of Trump’s foreign policy • Steven Maher (author of this article) on the rise and fall of GE
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Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): January 10, 2019 Quinn Slobodian, author of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, on the history, theory, and practice of the doctrine
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Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): January 3, 2019 Samuel Moyn, author of Not Enough, on the paradox of human rights discourse arising alongside great inequality, and on the difference between poverty reduction and income compression
LBO News from Doug Henwood 