Dollars & Sense articles from September 2006

Dollars & Sense archives from September 2006

From the editors.(organized labor )
September 1, 2006... Organized labor's decline in the United States over the past three decades is a familiar story. This August marked the 25th anniversary of one of the pivotal moments in that decline: Ronald Reagan's decision to destroy the air traffic...

Btw ur fired.(Banana body piercing parlor's Alex Bartlett fires Katy Tanner)(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... "We've reviewed your sales figures and they're not up to the level we need. As a result we will not require your services any more. Thank you for your time with us." With this bland text message, manager Alex Bartlett of the Blue Banana body...

Estate tax end run.(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... One of the latest maneuvers in the so-far unsuccessful push to repeal the federal estate tax involves throwing a bone to the timber industry. The bill to cut the estate tax that passed the House in June included a provision cutting capital...

Monkey business.(economics )(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... In a June New York Times column, Freak-onomics authors Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt asserted that "economics is increasingly being recognized as a science" that can offer insight on "nearly any aspect of modern life." Their evidence? That...

Canaries in the coal mine.(economic downturn first effects the blacks )(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... Left economic observers have long pointed out that Blacks in the United States are the first to feel the effects of an economic downturn. Recent unemployment data continue to make the point. "The unemployment rate, which usually moves in...

More women in prison.(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... The number of women in prison worldwide now tops half a million. Of these, one-third are in the United States and another third are in China, the Russian Federation, and Thailand combined, according to a report from the International Center for...

Ampersand.(the short run)(Cartoon)
September 1, 2006... amptoons.com [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Financial tip: save on shipping costs.(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... People often contact us assuming that "Dollars & Sense" must be a personal finance magazine. We don't generally run articles telling you how to save for retirement by skipping your daily latte; still, anyone can use some tips on how to save a...

Letters.(Letter to the editor)
September 1, 2006... To the editors: It is too bad that Mr. Chaudhry had so many factual errors in his story, "Minding the Timor Gap." Principally, he wrote "UNCLOS... endorses the median line principle as the guiding norm for resolving such claims." The...

Young Workers United.(social assistance)
September 1, 2006... "Sometimes workers are not down for risking their jobs. We're there for them when they need us," says Dante Grant, a member of Young Workers United (YWU), which provides resources to low-income workers in the food service and retail industries....

Justice at Smithfield.(United Food and Commercial Workers International Union and Smithfield Foods Inc.)(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... This summer the United Food and Commercial Workers union brought its "Justice at Smithfield" campaign on the road, in a multi-city tour that brought together union, civil rights, and immigrant rights activists to raise public awareness about...

Hotel workers rising.(campaign )(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... Most hotel guests don't think much about the person who changes the sheets, vacuums the room, cleans the bathroom, and replaces the dirty towels, but the hotel worker--likely an immigrant woman--typically does these arduous tasks for little pay...

Kentucky River threatens to swamp labor: an NLRB ruling could eliminate millions of workers' right to unionize.(National Labor Relations Board)
September 1, 2006... Kentucky River. If the name doesn't worry you, you need to know more about the latest effort to eliminate labor unions. There are currently three cases, collectively referred to as the "Kentucky River" cases, working their way through the...

Fictional fast-food workers of the world: unite! Burger King's mocking ad campaign.(comment)
September 1, 2006... When I was in the eighth grade, back in the Reagan years, my social studies class was given an assignment to produce a political pamphlet for a candidate in the 1988 presidential election. On the day our assignments were returned, a surprising...

Flight attendants make labor history.(Association of Flight Attendants and Northwest Airlines Corp.)
September 1, 2006... Peter Rachleff wrote this open letter to the 9,000-plus Northwest Airlines flight attendants, members of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, when in mid-August they rejected, for the second time, a deeply concessionary contract proposal...

War in Lebanon: Dollars & Sense collective member Mary Jirmanus recounts her stay in Beirut during the war in July.
September 1, 2006... How are things over there?" I read an e-mail on July 15 from a friend while sitting in my cousin's apartment in Rabieh, a Beirut suburb. It reads, "I can't imagine what it's like there--here things seem to be moving so slowly." There: the...

The fight for transparency at the Federal Reserve.
September 1, 2006... The Federal Reserve banking system is an immensely powerful institution, on a par with a fourth branch of government. As such, it deserves more attention and scrutiny than it now receives, and not just from the financial community trying to...

Nike to the rescue? Africa needs better jobs, not sweatshops.
September 1, 2006... Nicholas Kristof has been beating the pro-sweatshop drum for quite a while. Shortly after the East Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Kristof, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and now columnist for the New York Times, reported the...

The rise of migrant worker militancy.(illgeal immigrants contribute to economic stability)
September 1, 2006... Testifying before the Senate immigration hearings in early July, Mayor Michael Bloomberg affirmed that undocumented immigrants have become indispensable to the economy of New York City: "Although they broke the law by illegally crossing our...

Oaxaca's dangerous teachers.
September 1, 2006... A 8:30 AM on October 21, 2002, Oaxaca state police arrested a dangerous schoolteacher. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Romauldo Juan Gutierrez Cortez was pulled over as he was driving to his school in the rural...

Indigenous farm workers: in California fields.
September 1, 2006... Indigenous people from Oaxaca, Chiapas, Puebla, and Guerrero have been migrating within Mexico, and to the United States, for decades. Many were braceros during that program's 22-year run from 1942 to 1964. And in Mexican valleys from Sinaloa...

Worker-owners and unions: why can't we just get along?
September 1, 2006... You have probably heard the story of the scorpion that convinces a frog to carry it across a river. Halfway across, the scorpion stings the frog, which means both will drown. The frog does not understand; the scorpion explains, "I couldn't help...

A reply to "Marxian class analysis and economics".
September 1, 2006... Rick Wolff's article in the May-June issue of Dollars & Sense offers a clear, brief, and useful summary of Wolff's views of Marxian economics and class, as developed over many years with his collaborator Stephen Resnick. Their view is by no...

World trade talks collapse: why the world's poor countries are breathing a sigh of relief.(economy in numbers)
September 1, 2006... This summer, the globalization bandwagon came to a screeching halt--although you wouldn't know it from the headlines. In July, the current round of World Trade Organization talks collapsed for good. This was only the latest breakdown in...

Ask Dr. Dollar.(inflation)
September 1, 2006... Dear Dr. Dollar: Back in first-year economics we learned that there is a tradeoff between unemployment and inflation, so you can't really have both low inflation and low unemployment at the same time. Do economists still consider that to...