Outside the limelight

by: Erica Brody

Mon Mar 08, 2010 at 17:27:50 PM EST

Last night at the Oscars, Kathryn Bigelow broke a celluloid glass ceiling, becoming the first woman filmmaker to win best director. And that’s something to celebrate this International Women’s Day.

But every time we see a crack in the glass, we need to remember the people on the lowest rungs of our societal ladder, people who need our attention – if not the limelight. Like women. After all, women are more likely to live in poverty, face job and pay discrimination, and be abused. Not to mention that women are disproportionally affected by disasters, like Hurricane Katrina. And that’s just for starters.

Poverty & Jobs
As we found out last fall, women make up more than half of the U.S. workforce. Yet

Job Losses Graphic

by: Mae Singerman

Wed Feb 17, 2010 at 10:20:49 AM EST

This is a dramatic graphic put out by the Obama administration today. I love graphic representations of complicated data, but also am weary of oversimplification to prove a point. Anybody have a good analysis on this graph?  You can view it in it's full size HERE

The Jobs Bill We Really Need

by: Alex Haber

Fri Feb 12, 2010 at 12:36:03 PM EST

Great news about jobs! Also, terrible news!

by: Philip Bump

Fri Feb 05, 2010 at 11:31:58 AM EST

As you may have heard, the government released numbers indicating that the unemployment rate dropped to 9.7% in January. Hooray!

You may also have heard that the country lost 20,000 more jobs. Um, boo?

Your natural reaction (as was mine) might be: how does that happen? How do we lose jobs, but still have reduced unemployment? It's not that swine flu, is it?

Nope. As explained in this great blog post at NPR, the data come from two different surveys: one of employers (which gave us the 9.7% figure) and another of households (which showed the drop).  The differences between these two surveys are more fully fleshed out by a piece at FoxNews.com, which explains that while the Bureau of Labor Statistics' employers poll covers more people, the survey of households is statistically significant, covering over 100,000 homes.

The truth, of course, lies somewhere beyond these approximations. December's employment figures, for example, were recently revised  downward from an estimated 85,000 jobs lost to a whopping 150,000.

In other words, take a look at the numbers released today - but be prepared to revisit them in a month or two.

Celebrate Labor Day by supporting the Employee Free Choice Act

by: Arieh Lebowitz

Wed Sep 02, 2009 at 14:15:36 PM EDT

By Sybil Sanchez

Aug 29, 2009: NEW YORK (JTA) -- This Labor Day, take a moment to remember people like Lupe Hernandez.

When she toured a Jewish family's apartment in the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, she felt connected to our history as immigrants struggling to make better lives for ourselves and our families. Hernandez is one of the immigrant workers on strike in the 2007 film "Made in LA" struggling to receive a fair wage and stop sweatshop abuse by organizing.

Labor Day might seem like a quaint throwback, but the struggle for workers' rights is still being fought today in our own backyards.

Our community's relationship to labor is very different today than in yesteryear, but the Jewish obligation to remember our history remains relevant. As Jews, we must respect and support workers' rights, whether it's those of our ancestors or today's immigrants.

While most headlines are focused on health care reform, labor law reform should stay on our agenda -- specifically, the Employee Free Choice Act. This much-needed legislation has three important principles: Workers would more easily be able to join or form a union; employers who break the law in efforts to stop union organizing would face more stringent penalties and workers who have chosen to form a union would have a clear path to an initial collective bargaining agreement with their employer.

Today, 44 percent of newly formed unions are unable to reach initial agreements, a serious problem the current law fails to address.

The majority sign-up route to union recognition provided by the Employee Free Choice Act has a long history and is in widespread use today in the United States and many other countries. But there's a catch: Under current law, workers can form a union via majority sign-up only if their employer agrees to it - which most employers refuse to do, even when worker support for the union is overwhelming.

Supporting this legislation is a no-brainer if one supports workers' right to collectively negotiate for decent wages and working conditions.

The Jewish Labor Committee has been a longtime supporter of the Employee Free Choice Act. We're not alone. A number of other Jewish organizations also have endorsed it, including the Progressive Jewish Alliance in Los Angeles, Chicago's Jewish Council for Urban Affairs, Philadelphia's Jewish Social Policy Action Network, Washington's Jews United for Justice and New York's Uri L'Tzedek. A visit to Rabbisforworkerschoice.org reveals the support of dozens of rabbis.

Ofer Eini, chairman of Israel's federation of labor, the Histadrut, also has weighed in on the issue, conveying his support In a recent letter to John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO.

"The Employee Free Choice Act will bring U.S. law for union recognition into conformity with Israeli law and international human rights standards on the freedom of association in the workplace," Eini wrote. "We believe that U.S. workers, and all workers, should have the same rights as Israeli workers, to organize unions free from employer interrogation, intimidation and harassment.

"In Israel, when workers seek to bargain collectively, they just join together into a union, in the same manner that they join any other organization," he added. "When a sufficient number of workers have joined a union, they can demand recognition from their employer. If the employer refuses, the Labour Courts of Israel can investigate, and when it has determined that the required number of the workers are union members, that they have joined freely and without coercion, the court can require the employer to recognize the union."

According to Eini, the Employee Free Choice Act will "reform U.S. labor law so that the U.S. National Labor Relations Board is, like the National Labour Court of Israel, empowered to protect freedom of association, instead of thwarting it, as it is currently compelled to do by U.S. labor law."

"Unlike the National Labour Court of Israel, the National Labor Relations Board [NLRB] of the United States has no power to require the employer to recognize the workers' union except by first imposing an NLRB election," he said. "But NLRB elections are a cruel violation of the fundamental principles of free and fair and secret elections. In practice, they effectively prevent workers from exercising their right to freedom of association.

"Paid supervisors are trained by anti-union consultants to act as spies in the workplace. Thousands of workers are harassed, intimidated or fired each year by employers who do everything in their power to rob workers of their right to join unions and bargain collectively.

"So long as the employer-employee relationship remains one of power imbalance there is no way to reform an NLRB election to make it approach the standard of a free, fair and secret election.

"But as the experience of Israel teaches us, there is no reason to force workers through such a process. The National Labor Relations Board of the United States, like the National Labour Court of Israel, is fully capable of assessing the validity of union membership and verifying that membership was achieved without intimidation and coercion. It can do so without being required to impose an undemocratic and workers-rights-violating NLRB election. But it can do so only if the Employee Free Choice Act will pass as written."

The Histadrut leader concluded by calling on "all who desire that our countries' laws reflect our shared ideals of workplace social justice to support Employee Free Choice."

In this respect, Israeli law is pointing the way to a society that treats its workers with justice and dignity. Can we do any less?

Fellowship Opportunity- Jeremiah Fellowship

by: JNikzad

Wed Jun 03, 2009 at 14:49:28 PM EDT

Hey Guys,

 There's an awesome fellowship opportunity coming up in September that the Progressive Jewish Alliance is offering in Los Angeles.

 It's an amazing fellowship that trains and educates the next generation of Jewish social justice leaders.

 Check out www.pjalliance.org for more info on it.

All who are hungry. . . or jobless

by: Rabbi Jill Jacobs

Tue May 12, 2009 at 21:26:45 PM EDT

I just finished Sasha Abramsky's excellent Breadline USA: The Hidden Scandal of American Hunger and How to Fix It. Abramsky takes us inside food pantries, soup kitchens, and school lunch programs and introduces us to Americans struggling to feed themselves and their families. In a series of "interludes," Abramsky recounts his own adventures in hunger--while researching the book, he spends seven weeks living on a reduced food budget in order better to understand how it feels to be hungry.

The funny thing about this book is: while it purports to be about hunger, it's actually about jobs. 

All of the people whom Abramsky profiles are victims of our country's broken labor system. He devotes a chapter to the way that Wal-Mart has driven down wages for the entire service industry, laments the decline in the real value of the minimum wage, and visits manufacturing workers who have lost their pensions in a multi-million dollar company buy-out.  

Become a Jewish Funds for Justice service learning program leader

by: Rabbi Jill Jacobs

Mon Oct 13, 2008 at 12:23:21 PM EDT

Public spending to fight recession in Massachusetts?

by: Matt Borus

Wed Apr 09, 2008 at 12:19:00 PM EDT

The Boston Globe is reporting that Governor Deval Patrick is proposing to put people to work with a large infrastructure project aimed at repairing old bridges across the state.  The Globe estimates that it would create 23,000 construction jobs.

Bridge maintenance, of course, is an issue that's gotten more attention since the Minneapolis bridge disaster last year, and it may be particularly relevant to Massachusetts, an old state with a good bit of older infrastructure, and where "approximately 10 percent of the 5,500 bridges...are classified under federal standards as 'structurally deficient," according to a Globe report last August.

The biggest concern with it seems to be the funding mechanism, which would be a public bond that would increase the state's debt. While I'm a public policy student, I'm not an expert on the effects of state deficit spending.  I do know that some economic theory says that government should act counter-cyclically--i.e., when an economy is in an downturn, government should spend in order to get people working (and thus spending).  Arguably, programs like this helped to end the Great Depression by getting people working and spending.  While a liberal notion often associated with John Maynard Keynes, it's had a lot of influence--the Bush administration's tax credits are an example of it (albeit a timid one that's careful not to redistribute wealth away from the rich!).  

Of course, I also know that if a state is heavily in debt, that means that revenue is going to pay interest.  And if a state gets a bad bond rating (not sure if that's a concern here), that can increase those interest payments.  But it seems that the benefits may outweigh these costs if the proposal works.

Any thoughts?