Prometheus 6

Contact: Daniel Fowler
pubinfo@asanet.org
202-527-7885
American Sociological Association

Study: Union decline accounts for much of the rise in wage inequality

WASHINGTON, DC, July 21, 2011 — Union membership in America has declined significantly since the early 1970s, and that plunge explains approximately a fifth of the increase in hourly wage inequality among women and about a third among men, according to a new study in the August issue of the American Sociological Review.

"Our study underscores the role of unions as an equalizing force in the labor market," said study author Bruce Western, a professor of sociology at Harvard University. "Most researchers studying wage inequality have focused on the effects of educational stratification—pay differences based on level of education—and have generally under-emphasized the impact of unions."

From 1973 to 2007, wage inequality in the private sector increased by more than 40 percent among men, and by about 50 percent among women. In their study, Western and co-author Jake Rosenfeld, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington, examine the effects of union decline on both between-group inequality and within-group inequality. Between-group compares people from different demographics and industries, while within-group looks at people from the same demographics and industries.

Focusing on full-time, private sector workers, Western and Rosenfeld find that deunionization—the decline in the percentage of the labor force that is unionized—and educational stratification each explain about 33 percent of the rise in within-group wage inequality among men. Among women, deunionization explains about 20 percent of the increase in wage inequality, whereas education explains more than 40 percent.

Part of the reason for this gender discrepancy is that men have experienced a much larger decline in private sector union membership—from 34 percent in 1973 to 8 percent in 2007—than women (who went from 16 percent to 6 percent during the same period).

"For generations, unions were the core institution advocating for more equitable wage distribution," said Rosenfeld. "Today, when unions—at least in the private sector—have largely disappeared, that means that this voice for equity has faded dramatically. People now have very different ideas about what's acceptable in terms of pay distribution."

Interestingly, the study finds that union decline explains little of the rise in between-group inequality.

"Unions standardize wages so that people with similar characteristics—if they're union members—tend to have similar wages," Western said. "So, it makes sense that deunionization has little impact on between-group inequality, which, by definition, exists between groups of people that are different."

While the purpose of unions is to standardize wages for their members, Western and Rosenfeld find that even nonunion workers, if they're in highly unionized industries, tend to have fairly equal wages, partly because nonunion employers will raise wages to the union level to discourage unionization.

In terms of policy implications, Western and Rosenfeld think their study could help reignite the dialogue on labor unions, which they believe has disappeared from economic debates in recent years.

"In the early 1970s, unions were important for delivering middle class incomes to working class families, and they enlivened politics by speaking out against inequality," said Western. "These days, there just aren't big institutional actors who are making the case for greater economic equality in America."

The study relies on data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) from 1973 to 2007. A monthly survey conducted by the Bureau of Census, the CPS provides data from about 60,000 U.S. households representative of the U.S. population as a whole.

The Cult That Is Destroying America

Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.

So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.

The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president. Once again, health reform — his only major change to government — was modeled on Republican plans, indeed plans coming from the Heritage Foundation. And everything else — including the wrongheaded emphasis on austerity in the face of high unemployment — is according to the conservative playbook.

What all this means is that there is no penalty for extremism; no way for most voters, who get their information on the fly rather than doing careful study of the issues, to understand what’s really going on.

How Cuts Will Change the Black Middle Class
What will the shrinking of the public sector mean for the economic prospects of African-Americans?

What will the shrinking of the public sector mean for the black middle class?

The black unemployment rate nationwide is 16.2 percent, far higher than the 8.7 percent rate for whites. Yet nearly 20 percent of black workers are employed by the government, according to numbers cited in an article by the political scientist Walter Russell Mead. With states and cities under pressure to cut back spending on public employees, what effect might lower benefits, and fewer jobs, have on the economic prospects for African-Americans in particular?

Debaters

• Severe Hardship, Dashed Hopes

  Michael Dawson

• Look to the Private Sector

  Walter Russell Mead

• Consumers as Well as Employees

  Mary Pattillo

• The Vulnerable and the Comfortable

  Karyn Lacy

• The New Great Migration

  Daniel DiSalvo

• Oddly Upbeat on the Economy

  Ellis Cose

• It All Starts With the Vote

  Katherine Tate

P6's motto is "Don’t lie on Black folks...Don’t lie about Black folks...Don’t lie to Black folks". Boehner just did exactly that...no, it wasn't exclusively to Black folk but holding that position I have to say something here.

Tonight, John Boehner's speech was directed to the Teabaggers. Nevermind whether or not you understand the details, if you've even heard the news over the last month, you know Boehner's claim that their latest budget had bipartisan support is a lie.

No, five Democrats doesn't make it bipartisan.

The reason lies set me off is, if you have to lie to win your point, then what you're planning cannot deliver what you promise.

Which, of course, doesn't mean it can't turn out the way you want it to.

YouTube video on the other side of the link.

“WHY SHOULD YOU DIE FOR A TRANSFER?” SF POLICE KILL 19-YEAR-OLD, PROTESTS ERUPT
Posted on July 19, 2011 by Diane Bukowski
By Willie Ratcliff 
San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper
June 18, 2011

When police stopped a teenager stepping off the T-train yesterday to show his transfer as proof he’d paid his fare – $2 at most – he ran from them. They shot him as many as 10 times in the back and neck, according to witnesses. For many long minutes, as a crowd watched in horror, the boy, who had fallen to the sidewalk a block away, lay in a quickly growing pool of blood writhing in pain and trying to lift himself up as the cops trained their guns on him and threatened bystanders.

Having killed the boy [Kenneth Harding] at 4:44 p.m., according to the San Francisco Chronicle, in broad daylight at the main intersection – Third Street between Palou and Oakdale – in Bayview Hunters Point, San Francisco’s last largely Black neighborhood, the police seemed eager to terrorize the community. They waited and waited and waited as the teenager stopped moving but continued breathing before eventually setting him on a gurney and taking him to the hospital, where the Chronicle reports he died at 7:01 p.m.

Cheerleading is an Olympic sport now, right?

Suit Filed Arguing Title IX Uses Quotas
By KATIE THOMAS

The test gives schools three options for showing they are meeting the needs of female athletes. They can demonstrate that they are offering athletic opportunities that are proportionate to overall enrollment; that they have a history of expanding sports for women; or that they are meeting the athletic interests and abilities of their female student body.

The American Sports Council, which filed the suit, and other critics of the government’s enforcement of Title IX have long argued that the first option — that female athletes be represented in numbers that are proportionate to overall enrollment — amounts to a quota system that has pushed colleges to eliminate low-profile men’s teams rather than expanding sports for women. Title IX supporters have disputed that the test imposes quotas, saying schools have other ways of complying with the law.

Eric Pearson, the chairman of the council, says the trend is moving to high schools. “We’ve witnessed the destruction of sports opportunities at the college level and have great concern about the harm it will do to high school sports,” he said in a telephone news conference.

The lawsuit argues that the three-part test should not apply to high schools because the 1979 language that established it uses the word “intercollegiate” and not “interscholastic” athletics. It also argues that the use of a quota violates the equal protection clause of the Constitution.

Their argument was rejected in 2008 by the Office for Civil Rights, the division of the education department charged with enforcing Title IX, which noted that language in the original policy mentions its applicability to high schools.

So the NAACP 102nd convention starts today. Looking over the events brought no surprises, several events of general public interest...in fact, they just held the most interesting ones today...mixed into meetings of their internal committees, luncheons and such like. They're taking another step forward in their Internet strategy by publishing a smart phone app to support their convention

The NAACP’s convention application is like all the printed schedules and such you would normally pick up coming through the door, wrapped up and pre-delivered to your iPhone, Android or Blackberry cell phone or tablet. I took a look at the Android version (because, you see, I have no iPhone or Blackberry, and two Android devices: the Acer A500 tablet and the Evo 3D 4G cell phone).

The primary purpose of these convention apps is to keep you aware of the agenda on schedule for the events. They assume you’re already at the event. So, for instance, it’s got a complete schedule of events and will add the events of your choice to your calendar so you get reminders when events you’re interested in are about to start. It does not give you enough information to decide which events to attend. You will have checked out the convention web site or printed documentation for that.

There’s always a marketing aspect to convention apps, which nowadays means there’s a social networking aspect to them as well. This app has all that basically covered. Give it your Twitter login and/or Facebook email and it will…well, I’m not sure what it will do because I didn’t give it my info. Those credentials would let the convention’s systems post to your account. That’s just not something I’m willing to allow. You can give it your mobile phone number so they can text you with convention-related updates, too.

Maps and videos are expected in this sort of application. This one provides maps of the areas surrounding whose utility is severely limited by the fact that you can’t zoom in on them. It should transfer you to Google Maps when you click it. The LA Convention Center map is limited by being unable to zoom out. The application doesn’t have a landscape mode, nor does it scale for tablets. And its “back” navigation is implemented in software, ignoring the universal “back” button every app (including this one” renders on the screen.

These problems are a sign the app is built on a first generation platform, and frankly there’s a lot of that going around. Citibank’s mobile app doesn’t rotate or resize either. And Android telephone apps rarely scale properly for tablets. There’s stuff I could complain about, but were I at the convention I would find the NAACP’s convention app useful. And I’d look for a developer with a platform that’s better integrated with Android for next year.

When Obama cuts a deal giving Republicans Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid on a silver platter, will you feel stupid or betrayed?

“We have a Democratic president and administration that is prepared to sign a tough package that includes both spending cuts and modifications to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare that would strengthen those systems” while also providing new revenues, Mr. Obama said. And, he added, “we now have a bipartisan group of senators” and a majority of Americans who agree with such a balanced approach.

...except the majority of Americans still don't want cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. That is desired by the majority of American corporations.

The Congressional Progressive caucus's budget would achive all the cost savings we're looking for, without gutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Therefore it has been ignored...by the media, Republicans and the President...

[W]hile its sponsorship by staunch conservatives as well as liberals suggested enough flexibility within both parties to get a deal eventually, it would be all but impossible to turn it into detailed legislation — at the moment it is a four-page outline — and pass it in less than two weeks.

...in favor of any half-baked collection of failed ideas.

Bipartisan Plan for Budget Deal Buoys President
By JACKIE CALMES and JENNIFER STEINHAUER

WASHINGTON — President Obama seized on the re-emergence of an ambitious bipartisan budget plan in the Senate on Tuesday to invigorate his push for a big debt-reduction deal, and he summoned Congressional leaders back to the bargaining table this week to “start talking turkey.”

The bipartisan proposal from the so-called Gang of Six senators to reduce deficits by nearly $4 trillion over the coming decade — and its warm reception from 43 other senators of both parties — renewed hopes for a deal days after talks between Mr. Obama and Congressional leaders had reached an impasse.

Financial markets rallied on the news. And with time running out before the deadline of Aug. 2 to raise the government’s $14.3 trillion debt ceiling, Mr. Obama’s quick embrace of the plan left House Republicans at greater risk of being politically isolated on the issue if they continue to rule out any compromise that includes higher tax revenues.

Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader who has led opposition to any deal including tax increases, later issued a statement saying the bipartisan Senate plan includes “some constructive ideas to deal with our debt.”

But Mr. Cantor stopped far short of endorsing it. And House Republicans passed legislation on Tuesday evening calling for deep spending cuts and the adoption of a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget. Though the legislation has no chance of passing the Senate, the 234-to-190 vote was a symbolic statement by conservatives heading into the end game of a confrontation whose economic and political stakes are hard to overstate.

Corporate America’s chokehold on wages
By Harold Meyerson, Published: July 19

If you’re wondering why American consumers are still flat on their backs, rendering the economy similarly supine, the answer is both fundamental and simple: It’s not just that so many of them are unemployed. The ones who are employed are also underpaid.

Don’t take my word for it — take that of Michael Cembalest, the chief investment officer of J.P. Morgan Chase. He asserted in the July 11 edition of “Eye on the Market,” the bank’s regular report to its private banking clients, that “US labor compensation is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and US GDP.”

The primary subject of Cembalest’s report isn’t wages. It’s profits — specifically, the fact that profit margins (the share of a company’s revenue that goes to profits) of the Standard & Poor’s 500 companies are at their highest levels since the mid-1960s, despite the burdens of health-care costs, environmental compliance and other regulations that are presumably weighing down these large companies.

Man's call for Obama assassination is free speech, not crime, court rules
July 19, 2011 |  4:27 pm

A La Mesa man who posted racial epithets and a call to "shoot" Barack Obama on an Internet chat site was engaging in constitutionally protected free speech, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday in overturning his criminal conviction.

Walter Bagdasarian was found guilty two years ago of making threats against a major presidential candidate in comments he posted on a Yahoo.com financial website after 1 a.m. on Oct. 22, 2008, as Obama's impending victory in the race for the White House was becoming apparent. Bagdasarian told investigators he was drunk at the time.

Symptoms may linger even after the migraine has gone away. Patients with migraine sometimes call this a migraine "hangover." Symptoms can include:

• Feeling mentally dull, like your thinking is not clear or sharp
• Increased need for sleep
• Neck pain

Bachmann Says Migraines Won’t Be a Problem if She’s Elected President
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — Representative Michele Bachmann suffers from migraine headaches so intense that she at times has sought emergency medical treatment, but she said Tuesday that the condition would not prevent her from serving as president if elected.

“Let me be abundantly clear — my ability to function effectively has never been impeded by migraines and will not affect my ability to serve as commander in chief,” Mrs. Bachmann, Republican of Minnesota, said in a statement. She described the headaches as “easily controlled with medication.”

Mrs. Bachmann, who was campaigning Tuesday in South Carolina, was responding to a report in The Daily Caller, which published an article on its Web site Monday night citing unnamed advisers, including one who said that she “carries and takes all sorts of pills” for the headaches, and that the condition at times rendered her “incapacitated” — an assertion that her campaign and family members strongly disputed.

It doesn't mention the dead whistleblower but he had to write this yesterday.

Troubles That Money Can’t Dispel
By DAVID CARR

“Bury your mistakes,” Rupert Murdoch is fond of saying. But some mistakes don’t stay buried, no matter how much money you throw at them.

Time and again in the United States and elsewhere, Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation has used blunt force spending to skate past judgment, agreeing to payments to settle legal cases and, undoubtedly more important, silence its critics. In the case of News America Marketing, its obscure but profitable in-store and newspaper insert marketing business, the News Corporation has paid out about $655 million to make embarrassing charges of corporate espionage and anticompetitive behavior go away.

That kind of strategy provides a useful window into the larger corporate culture at a company that is now engulfed by a wildfire burning out of control in London, sparked by the hacking of a murdered young girl’s phone and fed by a steady stream of revelations about seedy, unethical and sometimes criminal behavior at the company’s newspapers.

So far, 10 people have been arrested, including, on Sunday, Rebekah Brooks, the head of News International. Les Hinton, who ran News International before her and most recently was the head of Dow Jones, resigned on Friday. Now we are left to wonder whether Mr. Murdoch will be forced to make an Abraham-like sacrifice and abandon his son James, the former heir apparent.

The News Corporation may be hoping that it can get back to business now that some of the responsible parties have been held to account — and that people will see the incident as an aberrant byproduct of the world of British tabloids. But that seems like a stretch. The damage is likely to continue to mount, perhaps because the underlying pathology is hardly restricted to those who have taken the fall.

As Mark Lewis, the lawyer for the family of the murdered girl, Milly Dowler, said after Ms. Brooks resigned, “This is not just about one individual but about the culture of an organization.”

Well put. That organization has used strategic acumen to assemble a vast and lucrative string of media properties, but there is also a long history of rounded-off corners. It has skated on regulatory issues, treated an editorial oversight committee as if it were a potted plant (at The Wall Street Journal), and made common cause with restrictive governments (China) and suspect businesses — all in the relentless pursuit of More. In the process, Mr. Murdoch has always been frank in his impatience with the rules of others.