Dollars & Sense articles from September 2002

Dollars & Sense archives from September 2002

Women's work.
September 1, 2002... Six years have passed since Bill Clinton and a Newt Gingrich-led Congress repealed welfare as we knew it, ending poor families' entitlement to a safety net of last resort. How have former welfare recipients and other low-wage workers fared in...

U.S. Government unmasked. (Environment).(protest against American environmental policy)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... "What are we going to do about the United States?" So grumbled a frustrated UN official, thinking his microphone was off, in response to U.S. government obstructionism at last June's environmental meeting in Bali. The UN-sponsored meeting...

The value of life. (Government).(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... What is a human life really worth? Plenty of people have plumbed the depths of this question-from philosophers to legal experts to, yes, economists. In fact, there's a whole branch of economics devoted to putting a dollar value on life. The...

Europe's least favorite celebrities. (Executive).(chief executive officers)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... Just as corporate credibility was crumbling stateside, Wall Street Journal Europe teamed up with GfK Ad Hoc Research Worldwide to poll Europeans on their opinions about their own CEOs. The results were, well, negative. Seventy percent of the...

Rumsfeld to the rescue. (Government).(Donald Rumsfeld awards contract to Halliburton Co.)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... A company that has defrauded the federal government and the public by lying about its income should at least be fined, its executives prosecuted, maybe even be put out of business, right? Even free-market ideologues would agree that a company...

"Barbie drug" under development. (Products).(Melanotan)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... Biotech companies in New Jersey and Australia are hard at work on a newly discovered drug that boasts a miraculous list of benefits. Scientists at the firms believe that "Melanotan" has the potential to simultaneously cause the skin to tan...

Guerrilla attack! (Advertising).(actors pose as consumers to promote products)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... Many now complain that we see ads everywhere; imagine if they were everywhere but you never knew you were seeing them? Desperate to sell its wacky T68i cell phone/digital camera combo, Sony Ericsson enlisted the marketing company Fathom...

Food market frenzy. (Products).(frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... Have you seen the new frozen, individually wrapped, round, crustless, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? The new spin on the traditional, all-American lunch staple comes from jelly company J.M. Smucker. "Uncrustables[R] are the perfect...

Building cooperative businesses: for immigrant women in Boston, worker cooperatives provide an alternative to welfare. (Active Culture).(related article: Economic Justice for Women in the World Economy: A Resource List)
September 1, 2002... At the Boston-area Sagla Eritrean Restaurant & Catering Cooperative, Mehert Risom and Alemash Hailu dish up spicy lentils and warm injera, a flat bread, to lunchtime guests. When business is good, that's good for Risom arid Hailu. As...

The workers aren't nontraditional--but the strategy should be: U.S. unions can only reach low-wage workers if they abandon old, exclusionary practices. (Comment).(service industries workers)
September 1, 2002... There's some exciting news coming out of Wisconsin. Last spring, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) launched a drive to organize thousands of home health aides in Madison. The effort, which promised to lift wages and benefits for...

When is a labor law violation not a labor law violation? in Hoffman Plastics, the Supreme Court struck a blow against the rights of undocumented workers. Immigrant rights advocates are fighting back. (Making Sense).
September 1, 2002... Jesus Perez owns a butcher shop in Washington Heights, a largely Dominican community in the northern section f Manhattan. Perez's shop is not large but it is worth paying attention to, and not for the quality of his rib roast. It's because last...

Mission impossible: a path-breaking new report on work-family balance in low-wage America shows why "It Just Doesn't Work". (Making Sense).(Raising Families and Keeping Jobs in Low-Income America: It Just Doesn't Work)
September 1, 2002... One morning, a Denver employer received a call from an employee. The employee, a mother of a young child, could not come to work that day because she had run out of diapers for her baby. Her child care center required parents to bring their own...

Surprising political alignments: unions and workers in Chavez's Venezuela. (Making Sense).(Hugo Chavez)
September 1, 2002... Last April, Venezuela made the headlines in the U.S. when President Hugo Chavez was briefly ousted in a coup. Two days later, Chavez was restored to office and Venezuela returned to the back pages. But if the coup itself was reversed, the deep...

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2002... To the Editor: Your May/June 2002 article, "They Can Walk With Their Heads Up," offered an unusually positive and insightful perspective on Brazil's Movimento Sem Terra (MST). My country's media often vilifies the country's few...

Slamming shut open access: Internet users are ready to switch to high-speed broadband. But they may be getting a lot less than they bargained for as regulatory changes create new internet service monopolies.
September 1, 2002... Imagine typing in the web address for your favorite site--Alternet, Working Families, even your kid's soccer league site--then having to wait so long for it to appear that you give up. Or getting a message on the screen reading, "The website...

Activists take on welfare reform: Two views.(related article: TANF Reauthorization: A Quick Guide)
September 1, 2002... The passage of welfare reform in 1996 was a moment of despair for anyone who cares about poverty and inequality in the United States. Here was one of the wealthiest countries in the world, led by a Democratic president, enjoying a long economic...

Good times, bad times recession and the welfare debate: recession means tougher times for working families. The debate on welfare reauthorization must face up to the new economic reality.
September 1, 2002... When President Clinton signed the welfare reform bill in August 1996, he could not have predicted that the next five years would bring such a rapid fall in welfare caseloads and such strong growth in employment among single mothers. The...

Dancing to a different samba: a visit to Brazil reveals lively movements hammering at inequality.
September 1, 2002... For a couple of days last May, nearly every TV in Brazil was tuned to the same spectacle: the Brazil Cup soccer finals. The scrappy, working class Corinthian team challenged the well-oiled Brasilheiros, viewed as the representatives of the...

Under the margins feminist economists look at gender and poverty: feminists say economics should recognize unpaid and undervalued work performed by women. Doing so will go a long way toward explaining--and addressing--poverty.
September 1, 2002... For all the hype about welfare-to-work, most former welfare recipients are still living in poverty. It is true that, since the advent of 1990s-style "welfare reform," families no longer on welfare are earning more, on average, than those still...

Comparable worth. (Primer).
September 1, 2002... There must be something to an idea that the business press has recently labelled "crackpot," "more government humor," an attempt "to Sovietize U.S. wage scales," and one of ten "dumbest ideas of the century." The idea is comparable worth (or...

Dear Dr. Dollar. (Ark Dr. Dollar).
September 1, 2002... The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has a website that purports to present evidence that the wealthiest group of Americans historically pay more taxes than middle- or low-income folks. Their sources include the U.S. Treasury...

Wages for Housework: the movement and the numbers; a woman's work in the home is never done, seldom counted, and hardly ever remunerated. Wages for Housework is trying to do something about that. (Economy in Numbers).(value of unpaid labor)
September 1, 2002... The International Wages for Housework Campaign (WFH), a network of women in Third World and industrialized countries, began organizing in the early 1970s. WFH's demands are ambitious--"for the unwaged work that women do to be recognized as work...