Dollars & Sense articles from January 1999

Dollars & Sense archives from January 1999

Organizing as a human right.
January 1, 1999... When Charlie Remington was fired in 1997 for trying to organize a union at Rogers Foam in Boston, he turned to the innovative community/labor coalition Jobs with Justice (JwJ) for help. After a year-long campaign that exposed the firing as a...

Cookies are not so sweet.(online database marketing)
January 1, 1999... Don't you just love those discount cards your supermarket gives you? The cashier swipes the card, and you save ten bucks on a weeks worth of food. And that shampoo that came as a free sample in the mail is so much better than your usual...

The true scandal of American politics.(1999 omnibus budget bill)
January 1, 1999... In a single 15 minute vote, the 535 members of Congress passed a 40 pound, $500 billion, 4000 page bill that not one elected official had read in its entirety. The bill, the Omnibus Appropriations Act, negotiated behind closed doors by a...

Nobel prize winner tweaks free marketeers.(Nobel laureate Amartya Sen)
January 1, 1999... Last October, Amartya Sen, a leading authority on hunger and an unrelenting advocate for the most deprived, won the rare accolade of the Nobel Prize for Economics. Still rarer was his "honor" of being denounced the day after winning by the...

It's a bank-eat-bank world.(includes related article on Canadian government action on contemplated bank mergers in Canada)(banking merger mania)
January 1, 1999... Los Angeles may be the nation's second largest city, but it no longer hosts a major bank. Nor do Houston, Philadelphia, San Diego, Phoenix, San Antonio, or Dallas - the U.S. cities ranked fourth through ninth in population. In the...

Beyond patching the safety net: a welfare and work survival strategy.
January 1, 1999... Rita Henley Jensen, a New York-based journalist who often covers welfare issues, tells the story of trying to track down the rationale for the 1996 welfare "reform" act, which could be more accurately described as welfare repeal. She started by...

What welfare reform has wrought.(includes related article on state governments' refusal to release employer quarterly wage reports to researchers)
January 1, 1999... Ending welfare as we know it" was just a campaign slogan for Bill Clinton in 1992, but its human effects are now being felt. Consider "Fern," a single mother in Connecticut with children ages twelve, five, and four. Under the old welfare law,...

Health care workers confront managed care.(includes related article on health care workers in Canada)
January 1, 1999... "The work speedup is serious enough that I'm questioning every day whether to continue in my job," says Jill Hallisey, a nurse practitioner at Boston Medical Center, the local public hospital. "Every year they have increased my patient load....

Cohousing: collective living for the 90s.(includes related articles on cohousing initiatives and low income cohousing)
January 1, 1999... Imagine a community where you know all your neighbors. Where your neighbors would loan you a car if you needed it, or take you to the hospital or cook dinner for you if you were ill. Think of a place where your children had lots of friends and...

Gold, greed and cyanide.
January 1, 1999... From the days when the Spanish conquistadors brutally seized the Inca Kingdom in the Andes in the 16th century, to the U.S. government watching over the destruction of Indian settlements as swarms of miners invaded the Sierra Nevada in the...

The Philippines: another I.M.F. casualty.
January 1, 1999... "Nearly 35% of [our] people live below the poverty line of P8,000 to 10,000 or $250 a year," said Filipino economist Filomeno Santa Ana, coordinator of the group Action for Economic Reforms at the University of the Philippines. "Ten percent of...

Revisiting rent control.
January 1, 1999... Although only a mile from Harvard, Central square was a vibrant and interesting Cambridge neighborhood, with lower income families living in the area for generations. That is, until rent control was lifted in Massachusetts in 1995. Rebuffed by...

Rent Control: Regulation and the Rental Housing Market.(Review)
January 1, 1999... by W. Dennis Keating, Michael Teitz and Andrejs Skaburskis (Center for Urban Policy Research, 1998) Skip Barry Although only a mile from Harvard, Central square was a vibrant and interesting Cambridge neighborhood, with lower income...

Toy Wars: The Epic Struggle Between G.I. Joe, Barbie, and the Companies that Make Them.(Review)
January 1, 1999... by G. Wayne Miller (Times Books, 1998) In the midst of Mattel's hostile takeover bid in January 1996, Hasbro CEO Alan Hassenfeld told a Rhode Island rally of his employees that his mother wanted him to fight off the larger toy company even...

Does inequality cause overwork?
January 1, 1999... Compared to other wealthy, Western countries America is a nation of workaholics. German workers, for instance, toiled a shocking 20% fewer hours than did Americans in 1997! These differences aren't simply cultural, since back in 1970 Americans...