Tag Archives: labor

Coberly: “We need more jobs with longer hours and cheaper plastic toys to distract ourselves from our empty lives.” being facetious . . . . Or Do we? EMichael: American Average Work Hours: At least 134 countries have laws setting the maximum length of the work week; the U.S. does not.In the U.S., 85.8 percent of males and 66.5 percent of females work more than 40 hours per week.According to the ILO, “Americans work 137 more hours per...

The italian website Bollettino Culturale hosted the following interview with Stavros Mavroudeas on the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences on the economy and labour https://bollettinoculturale.blogspot.com/2021/07/intervista-stavros-mavroudeas-sulla.html?m=1&fbclid=IwAR3zji71ezVNRABTmQbI4k-Uf7MYewhy26pdjmXISxlH2FdhMygmRswj_qs 1. How do you judge the management of the pandemic in the European Union? I have argued elsewhere...

Four measures of labor market losses in the pandemic Below is a graph of 4 ways of measuring the downturn in the labor market due to the pandemic:1. Payrolls (blue) – this is the headline jobs number from the establishment survey2. Civilian employment (green) – this is the equivalent number from the household survey.3. Aggregate hours worked (red) – tracks hours rather than jobs.4. Aggregate payrolls (gold) – tracks total payrolls rather than...

Pretty good piece in SSIR by Kevin Starr and Sarah Miers of the Mulago Foundation, why don’t big NGOs scale up other social entrepreneurs’ solutions? They spoke to a bunch of leaders and once they got past the laughter and disbelief at the idea, found “Not created here syndrome” that everybody knows about Big funders like government aid agencies prioritize project-based work Differing priorities at country vs. headquarters Hard to replicate someone else’s idea and get it to work They...

I was hunting for the exact location of "Prince's Tavern" in Manchester in 1833 when I stumbled upon an Economist article from March 30, 1844 addressing the "practical consequences" of reducing the length of the factory working day from 12 hours to 10. I am always fascinating by the profound and enduring hostility of a faction of employers -- amplified by their mouthpieces in academia and the press -- to the reduction of working time. I'm amazed how often their bile and zeal leads them to...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. There’s a new evaluation out of the Northern Ghana site of the famous expensive Millennium Villages project most associated with Jeff Sachs. I’m not an expert, but as I understand it, the theory is that an intensive big fix (building new institutions like hospitals and many other things at once) could fix the interdependent problems of poor areas.The thing is that Sachs insisted he knew it would work, and it didn’t need an...

One of the original Kodak “Shirley” cardsGuest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Have fun to everybody at the NEUDC conference this weekend! Fun fact: the Northeast Universities Development Consortium conference is being held at Northwestern, which is neither in the Northeast, nor the Northwest. The conference has never been held at Northeastern University. So for everybody complaining about confusing econ speak, this is what they do to themselves.An interesting idea...

So does labor fulfill freedom or create alienation? Likewise, does technology emancipate and fulfill us, or does it enthrall and disempower us? Marx's answer to the first question is that it does both, depending on the social relations within which it is defined, managed, and controlled. It would seem that we can answer the second question for ourselves, in much the same terms. Technology both extends freedom and constricts it.... Adding to what David Little says in this post, Hegel and...

The Guardian newspaper has a story about wages in England: A shortage of factory workers is starting to push up pay rates but wage rises in the services sector remain rooted at around 2%, according to the latest feedback from the Bank of England’s regional agents. The central bank said its agents, which are based in offices across the country, found that shortages this month across the manufacturing sector were leading to a “slight increase in pay growth”...

A presidential candidate like Donald Trump should not be viable. Candidates he supports should not be viable. The existence of Donald Trump should be a boon for the Democrats. And, in fact, it has been. But it hasn’t been enough. Perhaps four (or eight?) years worth of results will tip the balance for Democrats, but it is reasonable to ask: why have Democrats been coming up short against Trump, both in the Presidential election and in special elections...