Baker on job openings

The Skills Gap is Most Evident in Retail Trade and Restaurants by Dean Baker

supply and demand

The Trucking Industry Needs More Drivers. Maybe It Needs to Pay More. by Neil Irwin

In Connecticut, If Businesses Are Upset By Rising Wages, It Doesn't Matter What the Facts Are by Dean Baker

NLRB

NLRB Decision Could Make McDonald's Liable for Labor Practices of Franchisees by Julie Jargon

The National Labor Relations Board has notified McDonald's Corp. MCD +0.04% that it will start allowing workers filing labor complaints to treat the fast-food giant as a "joint employer" with its franchisees, a decision that could make the company liable for the labor practices of the thousands of independent operators who own its franchises. 

McDonald's employees, through a campaign organized by the Service Employees International Union, have alleged that they were fired for joining labor unions and have filed several lawsuits alleging that they were underpaid or had expenses deducted that left them below state or federal minimum-wage levels. 

If the NLRB's preliminary decision holds, it could set a precedent for the largely franchised fast food industry, in which parent companies are currently not held liable for the labor practices of their franchisees. Approximately 90% of McDonald's more than 14,000 U.S. restaurants are owned by franchisees. 

"We believe there is no legal or factual basis for such a finding, and we will vigorously argue our case at the administrative trials and subsequent appeal processes which are likely to follow from the issuance of the complaints," McDonald's said in a memo sent on Tuesday to franchisees about the NLRB decision, which was seen by The Wall Street Journal.

Supreme Court, unions, Great Clusterfuck

Supreme Court drastically curtails public sector unions by Yglesias

Robert Samuelson Wants People to Be Unemployed: The Economics of the Economics of the Great Recession by Dean Baker

May Day

It's International Workers' Day, here's the case for higher pay by Yglesias

Queering the Strike by Corey Robin

The fading buds of May by Chris Bertram

Unionizing the Bottom of the Pay Scale by Eduardo Porter

They both work in the fast-food industry — Mr. Carrillo at a McDonald’s in Midtown Manhattan and Mr. Williams at a Wendy’s in Brooklyn. They both earn a little more than $7 an hour. And they both need food stamps to survive. Last Thursday, both did something they had never done before: they went on strike.

...
On a full-time schedule, they could make a little over $18,000 a year, just about enough to keep a family of two parents and one child at the threshold of poverty. But full-time work is hard to come by. With fast-food restaurants increasingly using scheduling software to adjust staffing levels, workers can no longer count on a steady stream of work. Their hours can be cut sharply from one week to the next based on the business outlook or even the weather.

More than two million workers toil in food preparation jobs at limited-service restaurants like McDonald’s, according to government statistics. They are the lowest-paid workers in the country, government figures show, typically earning $8.69 an hour. A study by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning research organization, concluded that almost three-quarters of them live in poverty. And they are unlikely to have ever contemplated joining a union.  

...

If unions alone may be powerless, the thinking goes, they can be powerful as part of a broader social movement. “We need workers to come together in formations they haven’t done before,” says Mary Kay Henry, who heads the S.E.I.U. “The tipping point is the entire low-wage economy.” 

The odds that organized labor can tip the scales remain long, however. The S.E.I.U. did organize many janitors, but it did not stem the decline of unions across the economy. Despite the victories, janitors in the United States today earn about 10 percent less on average than they did in 1990, in inflation-adjusted terms. 

Still, if employers can’t be swayed to take on more responsibility for the welfare of their workers, the burden will fall on taxpayers. To put it succinctly, the bottom 40 percent of families earn less than they did almost a quarter of a century ago. If that trend continues, we may need a much bigger government.

Reminds me of the movie "Cloud Atlas." The government is subsidizing these companies' profits with food stamps. I guess it's better than the alternative:  higher unemployment and more poverty.

Walker's victory, un-sugar coated by Doug Henwood

Jonathan Chait on Scott Walker surviving the Wisconsin recall vote:

The Obama-Romney exit poll finding is probably the most surprising data point to emerge from the mess in Wisconsin. Obama has maintained strong support among minorities, and fairly strong support among college-educated white voters, but his standing with white voters lacking a college degree has fallen even below its low 2008 levels. If there’s any region where Romney ought to be making inroads, it’s upper Midwest states, where Obama still relies on blue-collar voters. Michigan and, to a lesser degree, Ohio ought to be exceptions, owing to the special circumstances of the auto bailout. Wisconsin and Iowa are ground zero for states likely to fall to Romney. Tonight’s exit polls suggest he’s much farther away than many of us believed.

But Walker’s win will certainly provide a blueprint for fellow Republicans. When they gain a majority, they can quickly move to not just wrest concessions from public sector unions but completely destroy them, which in turn eliminates one of the strongest sources of political organization for the Democratic Party. And whatever backlash develops, it’s probably not enough to outweigh the political benefit. Walker has pioneered a tactic that will likely become a staple of Republican governance. Fortune favors the bold.

Wisconsin Recall Vote

David Brooks (Bobo) on debt

Dean Baker responds

Turning Our Backs on Unions by Joe Nocera

Noah includes himself as one of those liberals “who spent too much time beating up unions,” as he told me recently. (He and I are both members of the informal Washington Monthly alumni society.) His thinking began to change in the early 1990s when he read “Which Side Are You On?” It is a powerful meditation on the difficulties unions face, written by Thomas Geoghegan, a Chicago labor lawyer. Researching “The Great Divergence” reinforced Noah’s growing view that when liberals turned their backs on unions — when they put, in his words, “identity politics over economic justice” — they made a terrible mistake.

Republicans outspent Democrats on the Wisconsin recall vote 7 to 1.