Labor

On June 3, 2003, the Treasury Department’s James Gilleran brought a chainsaw to a photo-op. While speaking to reporters, he promised to cut up piles of paper representing regulations of the financial sector. Joining him were representatives of four other U.S. regulatory agencies in charge of overseeing finance, armed with less formidable (but still sharp) gardening shears. The message was clear: The Bush Administration was tearing down the final pieces of the New Deal regulatory wall.

The spread of the swine flu contagion has yet to reach scary "I Am Legend" proportions, but things are getting pretty hairy out there. The World Health Organization has declared a pandemic, the first flu pandemic in 41 years, as infections continue to climb in the United States, Europe, Australia, South America and elsewhere.

"This is an easy issue to demagogue," says T.A. Frank, a fellow at the New America Foundation and an editor at the Washington Monthly... Original article

For the record, "Yes we can" emerged as a slogan later and less deliberately than one might think. The year was 1972, three years after César Chávez had appeared on the cover of Time magazine and two years after he had led farmworkers to a major victory against grape producers in California. Chávez was in Arizona trying to reverse a law prohibiting strikes by farmworkers during harvest time. Supporters of Chávez told him the law couldn’t be repealed. "No se puede," they said. Dolores Huerta, a

As Barack Obama prepares to get a stimulus plan launched this winter, carefully planting seeds of cross-party warmth and nurturing each rare shoot, he may wish to avoid unrelated matters that cause bitter partisan showdowns and lay waste to the whole damn thing. At least, that seems wisest when you're asking for a trillion or so in new spending. So people understood why Rahm Emanuel, during a meeting with the Wall Street Journal's CEO Council last November, dodged an inquiry about a contentious piece of legislation

Executive Summary

Americans instinctively revere the family as an institution that helps facilitate all other aspects of life. The family fosters attachments across generations, provides a nurturing environment in which to raise children, and is a means of transmitting values from one generation to the next. It is the foundation upon which our social contract has been built.

The California labor market has experienced drastic transformation and further change is expected as the workforce ages, immigration continues, and the gap between the earnings of skilled workers and those lacking education widens.

In November 2005, hotel employees in the city of Emeryville, California got some good news. Local voters had passed a “living wage” law requiring hotels to pay workers a minimum of nine dollars per hour plus extra for certain duties. In an expensive town--Emeryville occupies a narrow peninsula in the San Francisco Bay, making it attractive to tourists--this was welcome news. As the months went by, however, employees at one hotel, the Woodfin Suites, found that they were still being paid less than the law required. In… more