Last election in 2016 the American worker went for Trump in a big way….his promises of jobs and plants opening swung them to his corner…and so far most of his promises were just farts in a hurricane.
The American worker is dissatisfied with Trump so that bodes well for the Dems in 2020, right?
You would think so….but so far workers are unimpressed….
When one heckler yelled, “You’re an asshole!” at Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders at Philadelphia AFL-CIO’s first ever Workers’ Presidential Summit on Tuesday, the entire room roared back with chants of the senator’s name.
This was the most charged moment in a day of presidential candidates pitching union members including steel workers, drywall technicians, communications workers, school cafeteria employees, and airline food workers. Over the course of four hours, they heard from former Vice President Joe Biden, entrepreneur and tech executive Andrew Yang, New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio, Sanders, major Democratic donor and billionaire Tom Steyer, and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar.
But despite the candidates’ best efforts, the mood among the 2,000 attendees was one of general lackluster toward Democrats in the presidential race, and the six contenders who had showed up to try to win their votes. Notably, front-runner Sen. Elizabeth Warren was missing from the forum the day after she won an endorsement from the Working Families Party.
Labor would not be having this problem if they had in the early part of the 20th century had gone for political power instead of economic then this would be a easier race to watch.
Today we Americans celebrate what passes for Labor Day……we go about BBQ and beer and games and seldom remember that the brave people a hundred years ago had to fight for the benefits that Americans take for granted today.
So as a service to my readers I give them a history of the labor movement….
The labor movement in the United States grew out of the need to protect the common interest of workers. For those in the industrial sector, organized labor unions fought for better wages, reasonable hours and safer working conditions. The labor movement led efforts to stop child labor, give health benefits and provide aid to workers who were injured or retired.
The origins of the labor movement lay in the formative years of the American nation, when a free wage-labor market emerged in the artisan trades late in the colonial period. The earliest recorded strike occurred in 1768 when New York journeymen tailors protested a wage reduction. The formation of the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers (shoemakers) in Philadelphia in 1794 marks the beginning of sustained trade union organization among American workers.
Labor strikes? When was the very first labor strike in history?
The most important cultural value in ancient Egypt was harmony; known to the Egyptians as ma’at. Ma’at was the concept of universal, communal, and personal balance which allowed for the world to function as it should according to the will of the gods. Throughout most of Egypt’s history this belief served the culture well. The king’s primary duty was to uphold ma’at and maintain balance between the people and their gods. In doing so, he needed to make sure that all of those below him were well cared for, that the borders were secure, and that rites and rituals were performed according to the accepted tradition. All of these considerations provided for the good of the people and the land as the king’s mandate meant that everyone had a job and knew their place in the hierarchy of society.
At certain times, however, the king found it difficult to maintain this harmony due to the press of circumstance and a lack of resources. This situation is clearly apparent toward the end of each of the three periods known as “kingdoms” and sometimes during but an especially interesting incident during the New Kingdom (c. 1570- c.1069 BCE) stands out because it occurred before the actual decline of New Kingdom power and, according to some scholars, marks the beginning of the end: the first labor strike in recorded history.
Labor is a subject I like to keep my knowledge flowing…… for back years ago I was a labor organizer for the IWW……so I give you some of the songs from the past labor fights…..enjoy some tunes.
Finally Americans are starting to wake up to how damn important the labor movement is as well as unions…..
Sixty-four percent of Americans approve of labor unions, surpassing 60% for the third consecutive year and up 16 percentage points from its 2009 low point. This comes 125 years after President Grover Cleveland signed a law establishing the Labor Day holiday after a period of labor unrest in the U.S.
Union approval averaged 68% between Gallup’s initial measurement in 1936 and 1967, and consistently exceeded 60% during that time. Since 1967, approval has been 10 points lower on average, and has only occasionally surpassed 60%. The current 64% reading is one of the highest union approval ratings Gallup has recorded over the past 50 years, topped only in March 1999 (66%), August 1999 (65%) and August 2003 (65%) surveys.
We hear from our beloved monarch that our manufacturing sector is doing well and that we will be opening 6 or 7 news steel mills soon.
He spent all day Tweeting his ass off about the Fed and manufacturing……..according to His Majesty our manufacturing is doing really well.
But just how well is our manufacturing really doing?
Trump has long claimed that he and his policies would be a boon to workers, especially blue-collar ones. But since he became president, over 716,000 American workers have received pink slips from their employers as jobs are eliminated and plants close.
“716,341 workers have been notified of plant closings and layoffs,” American Bridge 21st Century said in a statement on Wednesday, citing their analysis of the publicly available information.
The numbers may actually be worse, since several states — Arkansas, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, and Wyoming — haven’t provided data.
We can pretend that there is a wealth of issues that will drive them voters to the polls…..beating, Trump, Climate Change, nation security, etc etc, but the truth is that all these are secondary………the main issue that the candidates need to clarify their positions is…..economics.
Whatever distractions candidates promote to win voters, some underlying issues will wield their influence on 2020 election outcomes in any case. The biggest of these are the historically accumulated anger and betrayal felt by millions of working class Americans. Since the 1970s, their relative position within income and wealth distributions has declined. Real wages stagnated while workers’ rising productivity made ever more profits for employers, widening inequality. That alone depressed the class, but US society is structured to add many political, cultural, and social demotions onto those whose relative economic position declines.
As stagnant real wages constricted workers’ consumption growth, political supports (from government programs to politicians’ attentions) shrank. Shifting cultural norms (smart phones, fashionable bars, fancy sports arenas, etc.) entailed new costs that were increasingly unaffordable. Rising consumer debt (mortgages, car loans, and credit card balances) only partly offset the new costs. Yet that debt also raised new kinds and degrees of financial anxieties.
Candidates, the party matters not, do what they must to gain votes….pretend the issue is important then lie about what they will do to rectify the problem.
And the American worker is still waiting for that candidate that will do what they say to improve their lot…….this batch of candidates is a typical batch…..liars and pretenders every one.
But since they seem to have a hard time finding a foothold then let me help them out…..
A Congressional Budget Office analysis published Monday showed that raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025 would significantly increase pay for over 27 million workers and lift 1.3 million people—including hundreds of thousands of children—out of poverty.
The CBO also found that more than doubling the federal minimum wage would boost the income of families earning less than three times the poverty rate by nearly $22 billion.
MY friend and regular reader of IST Carl of “I Know I made You Smile”……https://carldagostino.wordpress.com/……ask a good question in one of his comments after reading one of my posts.
His question fired me up to do what I truly enjoying doing…research…..so as promised here is the best answer that I could come up with since I am not an economist by trade it may get a bit techy…..
A common bit of confusion is between jobs and labor…..first what causes a labor shortage?
A labour shortage can be caused by a turn in economic conditions where there is a shortage of skilled workers for a given industry or overall job market. … Shortages can also be caused by a mismatch in skills, poor compensation, geographic location or ineffective recruitment by employers
Now the difference between Labor force and workers…..Employees are considered part of the labor force, but the terms “employees” and “labor force” don’t mean precisely the same thing. Not everyone in the labor force would fit the exact definition of an employee, since the labor force includes a much broader category of people. The labor force is a blanket term describing an entire collection of people either employed or seeking employment.
Is that confusing enough?
Maybe this short video will help…..
After writing this I realized that this may not answer the question Carl asked….I apologize if I made it more confusing.
Another reason I do not like economics…..too damn confusing and none of the “laws” seem to work without some sort of adjusting.
We hear a lot by the conservs telling America about the “booming econ0omy” and the return of jobs under Trump…..
But the figures from last month are not showing that rosy or that optimistic….
Job creation skidded to a near-halt in May in another sign that the U.S. economic momentum is slowing.
Companies added just 27,000 new positions during the month, according to a report Wednesday from payroll processing firm ADP and Moody’s Analytics that was well below Dow Jones estimates of 173,000.
The reading was the worst since around the time the economic expansion began and the jobs market bottomed in March 2010 with a loss of 113,000. Since then, the private payrolls count has increased by 21.3 million.
“Job growth is moderating,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said in a statement. “Labor shortages are impeding job growth, particularly at small companies, and layoffs at brick-and-mortar retailers are hurting.”
The “economy” they speak of is the Wall St. econo0my not the Main Street economy……keep that in mind as you prepare for the search for a candidate in the 2020 election.
Since the pundits say the economy will be the main issue in the 2020 election……maybe the voter should keep a close eye on the facts not the political spin.
Today is the International Day of the Worker……he world with the exception of the US will celebrate the worker and his/her contribution to society….the US has to be different and ours is in September….
Knowing me as you do…I must offer some clarification and some history….(it is in my nature)…….
To help my readers with the history of this day I will post a couple of short videos……
As a closing question……who was the first person to use the term….”workers of the world unite” (oh Hell use Google if you must)…………
Tomorrow is the International Day of the Worker….so I thought I would post on labor and its place in American society…..
I live in Mississippi a right to work state….a term that sounds good but in reality means that if you want to work then you will work for less money……what a glorious idea of the conserv pricks in our country……I have written what I think of this idea…..and none of it flattering….
To say that I am not a supporter of this rip-off of the American worker would be an understatement…….but at least one state is fighting back at the attempt to make right-to-work a stable of their economy…….right to work supporters tried to use this as a union busting move and for the most part it was successful……..but Illinois is fighting back……
With the support of labor unions, a new bill prohibiting municipalities in the state from enacting “right-to-work laws” was signed into law by Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker last week.
The “Collective Bargaining Freedom Act” prohibits local right-to-work ordinances and imposes penalties for violations.
Right-to-work laws became a focus for state lawmakers after the village of Lincolnshire, a northern suburb of Chicago, passed one in 2015.
Is this a little known battle of the Revolutionary War? The War of 1812 maybe? How about a decisive battle of the Civil War?
To be honest none of those would be accurate.
As a former labor activist and union organizer I am well aware of this “battle”……this is the battle of coal miners against the exploitative coal mine owners…….
The year is 1921…….
The Battle of Blair Mountain was the result of years of bitter labor disputes between the miners and coal companies of southern West Virginia. Since the late 1800s, the coalfields of the state’s Mingo, Logan and McDowell Counties had operated under a repressive company town system. Workers mined using leased tools and were paid low wages in company currency, or “scrip,” which could only be used at company stores. Safety conditions were often deplorable, yet despite the efforts of groups such as the United Mine Workers (UMW), the mine operators had kept unions out of the region through intimidation and violence. Companies compelled their workers to sign so-called “yellow dog contracts” pledging not to organize, and they used armies of private detectives to harass striking miners and evict them from their company-owned homes.
The hostilities only ramped up in 1920, when the UMW finally started to organize workers in Mingo County. On May 19 of that year, members of the Baldwin-Felts detective agency arrived in the town of Matewan to evict union miners from houses owned by the Stone Mountain Coal Company. After catching wind of the detectives’ activities, Matewan Mayor Cabell Testerman and a pro-union sheriff named Sid Hatfield raised a small posse and confronted them near the local train station. A verbal argument quickly escalated into a gunfight, and when the smoke cleared, seven Baldwin-Felts agents had been killed along with Mayor Testerman and two local miners.
Labor history is one part of the American history experiment that is seldom taught in our schools….sadly because it was an important part of our history…..
For the lazy among us….a short videos explaining the Battle Of Blair Mountain……
Saturday cooler temps and a MoMo that is ready to go outside and chase something…matter not what….
Many people have been showing how AI will effect our society in the future……the one that most concerns me is the loss of jobs….
To begin with the prediction that half of all jobs will to lost in the future….
Almost half of all current jobs will become obsolete in just 15 years, according to one of China’s leading experts in artificial intelligence (AI).
Kai-Fu Lee, a writer, venture capitalist and technology executive who has over 30 years’ experience in AI, claims the world of employment is facing a crisis. He’ll appear on CBS 60 Minutes on Sunday to spread the word and warn those most at risk so they can start retraining for the new world. Lee also warns that education will need to adapt to prepare younger generations for the new landscape.
AI may be the future, but it can’t do everything, claims Lee, who says certain professions are safe from the revolution. Especially those that involve empathy or human to human interaction like therapists, nurses, teachers or doctors. Innovative and creative professions are also safe because AI generally struggles to do the work of scientists or to deal with the unknown.
That is worldwide…but what will the predicted impact of AI will have on US jobs?
Robots aren’t replacing everyone, but a quarter of U.S. jobs will be severely disrupted as artificial intelligence accelerates the automation of existing work, according to a new Brookings Institution report.
The report, published Thursday, says roughly 36 million Americans hold jobs with “high exposure” to automation — meaning at least 70 percent of their tasks could soon be performed by machines using current technology. Among those most likely to be affected are cooks, waiters and others in food services; short-haul truck drivers; and clerical office workers.
“That population is going to need to upskill, reskill or change jobs fast,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings and lead author of the report.
Muro said the timeline for the changes could be “a few years or it could be two decades.” But it’s likely that automation will happen more swiftly during the next economic downturn. Businesses are typically eager to implement cost-cutting technology as they lay off workers.
