Randi Rhodes Forums

"Free trade" -- moving factories across borders to evade the protections of democracy that generations of Americans fought for -- pits exploited workers with few rights and no means of improving their condition against Americans who once had environmental and wage protections. But such ideas as protecting the gains of democracy are out of favor. That is labeled "protectionism" and is thought for some treason to be a bad thing. Conservatives were able to break the unions and wages for working people have stagnated, while the amount going to the top few has soared


Among the applicants: a former manager of a major distribution center for Target; a consultant who oversaw construction projects in four Western states; a supervisor at a plastics recycling firm. Some held college degrees and resumes in other fields where they made more money.

But they're all in the factory now making $15 an hour—about half of what the typical German autoworker makes


Tea Party Wants To End Minimum Wage

The Tea Party has its sights set on the minimum wage. They say it is "unconstitutional" and want it "abolished."

Your Wages Are Next


If you still have a job, your wages are next. You can bet that executives in every company are wondering why they are paying their employees so much when there are so many hungry, unemployed people out there looking for work. Every dollar they can save on paying you goes into their pockets.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... rc=nl_wonk





What was that you said, Mr Friedman?



"Here is a little dose of reality about where we actually rank today," says Vest: sixth in global innovation-based competitiveness, but 40th in rate of change over the last decade; 11th among industrialized nations in the fraction of 25- to 34-year-olds who have graduated from high school; 16th in college completion rate; 22nd in broadband Internet access; 24th in life expectancy at birth; 27th among developed nations in the proportion of college students receiving degrees in science or engineering; 48th in quality of K-12 math and science education; and 29th in the number of mobile phones per 100 people..."


http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/ ... -Fredoms...


Labor and community groups will gather at the Queens Center Mall to raise awareness to Halloween shoppers about what working in retail is really like--and based on the looks of our retail zombies, it's a horror!! The Queens Center Mall receives tens of millions in taxpayer subsidies and yet the people who work in the mall make poverty wages.

The Queens Center Mall Campaign (QCMC), a coalition of community groups that seeks to hold the mall accountable to workers, shoppers, and community members, seeks to win living wages for workers in the mall. The Queens Center Mall needs to change from a poverty wage center to a source of good jobs for those in the community. To learn more about the working conditions at the Queens Center Mall, see the following report


http://www.maketheroad.org/report.php?ID=1085

Republicans work for the rich and they want to enslave us all. They put the tax burden on the Middle Class then they make the Middle Class poor. They destroy schools and universities, so the next generation will not have a chance to get good jobs. The US will have an economy much like Somalia.

There is nothing holding rich folks in the US (this dying nation that will soon have rampant diseases). They can take their millions and overseas factories, leaving us the bill for the National Debt.

http://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/node/2017

During the Great Depression, workers were on strike because the elite were spending huge amounts of money while cutting wages and making working conditions unbearable. Take a look at some of their mansions.

and just prior to that during the Gilded Age, it was even worse...

This is what the baggers want to go back to , idiots

I still cant get over Sharon Angle, not fit to take out the garbage, going to maybe become a fucking US Senator, this has to tell us that many Americans would literally rather starve to death, die of disease, remain uneducated (she hates education) so as to hold on to their right to be racists, period.

Yes, Republicans want to return the US to the "good ol' days of the Great Depression" and make sure that we don't have any perks for human beings (such as universal health care, welfare for those who temporarily fell on hard times, educations, which will eventually help corporations, etc).

During the Great Depression, wages were cheap and people would do virtually anything just to stay alive. Corporations like cheap labor. That's why Republicans griped about illegal aliens flooding the border but did nothing to stop them, as the illegal aliens took jobs of Americans and thereby lowered wages for all.

The goal of the Republican party is to make slaves of everyone but the few billionaires.

always seems to be the same recipee (disinvestment) decline in investment and consumer spending, and a sharp rise in productivity.

BIG DROP IN SUPPORT FOR 'FREE MARKET'



Obama’s economic policies offer at least some appeal to economic fairness, but the president’s continued reliance on “private-sector job creation” seems downright absurd when corporations feel no sense of obligation to add create in the United States. “Winning the Future” for Obama’s team has meant business-friendly efforts that are utterly failing to lift decaying communities out of job loss and misery.

Prolonged unemployment—particularly high in old manufacturing towns—not only has generated understandable pessimism about the future state of the economy, but it is also propelling an increasing number of Americans to question whether the “free market” is the best economic system. Americans are growing increasingly suspicious of the giant corporations which largely shape the economy.

Thus, the polling firm Globescan found a sharp drop in the level of support for “free enterprise”:


more


http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/ent ... _and_peev/

If Walmart Paid its 1.4 Million U.S. Workers a Living Wage, it Would Result in Almost No Pain for the Average Customer


Walmart and other low-wage employers are poster-children for free-market hypocrisy, claiming that the “market” dictates they pay poverty wages while shifting some of their labor costs onto the taxpayer. A 2004 study by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce estimated that just one Walmart store with 200 “associates” costs taxpayers over $420,000 per year in government assistance to the poor.

more

http://www.mindfully.org/Industry/2004/ ... 6feb04.htm

According to a recent analysis by the National Employment Law Project (NELP), the biggest growth in private-sector job creation in the past year occurred in positions in the low-wage retail, administrative, and food service sectors of the economy.

While 23% of the jobs lost in the Great Recession that followed the economic meltdown of 2008 were “low-wage” (those paying $9-$13 an hour), 49% of new jobs added in the sluggish “recovery” are in those same low-wage industries. On the other end of the spectrum, 40% of the jobs lost paid high wages ($19-$31 an hour), while a mere 14% of new jobs pay similarly high wages. As a point of comparison, that's much worse than in the recession of 2001 after the high-tech bubble burst. Then, higher wage jobs made up almost a third of all new jobs in the first year after the crisis.

The hardest hit industries in terms of employment now are finance, manufacturing, and especially construction, which was decimated when the housing bubble burst in 2007 and has yet to recover. Meanwhile, NELP found that hiring for temporary administrative and waste-management jobs, health-care jobs, and of course those fast-food restaurants has surged.

more


http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175389/ ... very/#more

In a Charlie Sheen way, we are winning the race to the bottom.

While healthcare jobs may be surging, pay is going down. In my union healthcare job I was making $16 an hour and had benefits and pension. In my non-union job i am making the $12 an hour I made when I first got out of school and have benefits (medical) for myself only and will have to pay $440 a month to cover my son. I was told that most employees put their kids on Medicaid....so, the partners take lots of nice vacations because their employees healthcare is basically covered by the taxpayers...interesting because most of these docs are very wealthy, do not want "Obamacare" and think they deserve tax cuts....in other words, why should they have to pay for anything? Needless to say, I'm looking for another job where ethics matter....

How scary is it that, here in Southern Cal, there is frantic recruiting by for profit schools for students to train in health care? These people are taking on $30-40K in student loans to end up in the above situation. I'm telling you-there will be a student loan bubble burst. Also, are we going to end up in a society where half the people work in health care and everybody pays half their income to support the system?

whoa hold on there how bout no trade deals that displace American workers leading to a need for aid and retraining. in fact how bout only trade deals that benefit American workers.


Obama To GOP: No Trade Deals Without Aid To U.S. Workers




more at link

How does corporate America have the gall? You pretty much know the answer, but for official confirmation let's turn to Erica Groshen, a vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York: It's easier here than in, say, the UK or Germany "for employers to avoid adding permanent jobs," she told the AP recently. "They're less constrained by traditional human-resources practices [translation: decency] or union contracts." In plainer English, here's Rutgers political scientist Carl Van Horn: "Everything is tilted in favor of the employers...The employee has no leverage. If your boss says, 'I want you to come in the next two Saturdays,' what are you going to say—no?"


more


http://www.makeahistory.com/index.php/r ... e-speedup-

I think the thing that makes me despair the most is that a lot of people in this country think that we don't deserve better. Kinda like abused spouses, we keep taking the beatings. Until we realize that we have just as much of a right to the wealth that our hard work generates as the fat CEO in the corner office, we'll continue the race to the bottom.

Wake up, America. Damnit!