Tags: cartoon, climate change, corporations, crisis, Europe, Greece, oil, rail, science, trucks
According to a new study from the International Monetary Fund,
Inequality has risen in many advanced economies since the 1980s, largely because of the concentration of incomes at the top of the distribution. Measures of inequality have increased substantially, but the most striking development is the large and continuous increase in the share of total income garnered by the 10 percent of the population that earns the most—which is only partially captured by the more traditional measure of inequality, the Gini coefficient (see Chart 1). . .
we find strong evidence that lower unionization is associated with an increase in top income shares in advanced economies during the period 1980–2010 (for example, see Chart 2), thus challenging preconceptions about the channels through which union density affects income distribution.
The main channels they identify include wage dispersion (unionization reduces inequality by helping equalize the distribution of wages), unemployment (union density does not, in general, raise unemployment), and redistribution (strong unions induce policymakers to engage in more redistribution by mobilizing workers to vote for parties that promise to redistribute income or by leading all political parties to do so). Thus, they find, lower union density can increase top income shares by reducing the bargaining power of workers.
The obvious policy conclusions, then, are to improve rules and regulations that allow workers to organize and bargain collectively and to engage in corporate governance reforms that give workers more of a say in the major decisions taken by enterprises—not only in terms of executive pay, but also where and when jobs are created and how the resulting surplus is allocated.
Tags: Germany, Greece, video, Yanis Varoufakis
My only excuse: it’s Friday. . .
Tags: cartoon, debt, Germany, Greece, jobs, profits, recovery, Sisyphus
Tags: cartoon, FIFA, HSBC, money laundering, Qatar, Right to Work, segregation, workers, World Cup
Tags: book, capitalism, Fifty Shades of Grey, film, inequality
I haven’t read Fifty Shades of Grey nor have I seen the film. But at some point I may have to, given what others are writing about this particular phenomenon in popular culture.
According to Heather Havrilesky,
the story of Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey isn’t really about dominance or bondage or even sex or love, despite all the Harlequin Romance–worthy character names. No, what Fifty Shades of Grey offers is an extreme vision of late-capitalist deliverance, the American (wet) dream on performance-enhancing drugs. Just as magazines such asPenthouse, Playboy, Chic, and Oui (speaking of aspirational names) have effectively equated the moment of erotic indulgence with the ultimate consumer release, a totem of the final elevation into amoral privilege, James’s trilogy represents the latest installment in the commodified sex genre. The money shot is just that: the moment when our heroine realizes she’s been ushered into the hallowed realm of the 1 percent, once and for all.
Lynn Stuart Parramore offers a similar interpretation:
Author E.L. James has often insisted that Fifty Shades of Grey is wildly popular not because of its titillating trappings of transgression, but because it tells a simple love story for the ages. But this is a romance for a particular kind of age — a time of growing inequality. The social order is breaking up and leaving massive human wreckage in its wake. Dreams of love turn into fantasies of power – who has it and what they can do to those who don’t have it. . .
The film is the dispiriting denouement of this late stage of capitalism, where cruel conditions are accepted and you learn to suffer the whims of the rich — and pretend to like it.
Havrilesky and Parramore have succeeded in doing something I hadn’t expected: they’ve made me rethink my initial ignoring of Fifty Shades. . .
Tags: academy, adjunct, professors, protest, wages, workers, working conditions
Today is National Adjunct Walkout Day. Adjunct professors on campuses across the country hope to draw attention to their poverty-level wages, with no chance of advancing to a tenure-track position.
According to an extensive crowd-sourced survey of adjunct working conditions conducted in 2012 by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce,
Adjuncts don’t make much money, they receive little support in terms of professional development from the institutions where they teach, and most would accept a full-time tenure-track position if it were offered to them.
As Karen Hildebrand, an adjunct professor at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, explains,
This National Adjunct Walkout Day aims to help adjuncts achieve parity with full-time faculty – better pay, job security, equality in professional development opportunities, etc.
But there are two things about this day that are pretty basic to how we treat each other and how we view the world.
First, hiring people as adjuncts sets a very bad example to college students. That’s not the way to treat people.
Instead of signaling “Get used to it – this is the world you will inhabit, we will use you, wring everything we can out of you and throw you out,” educators should be signaling, “Young College Graduate – we will help you make the world a better place.”
Second, this thing of paying substandard salaries to teachers is a victimization of people who love what they do.
Ask any musician or actor how many times she or he has been asked to donate a free performance. After all, to the people hiring them, it’s not real work – it’s fun! It seems people who love what they do are punished for it.
Parents tell their children, “Get a degree in something you love – but make sure you can make a living from it.”
Following that logic, teaching is one of the things that you shouldn’t get a degree in.