Portside

“The taxpayer costs we discovered were staggering,” said Ken Jacobs, chair of UC Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education and coauthor of a report about the cost of the low-wage fast-food industry to U.S. taxpayers. “People who work in fast-food jobs are paid so little that having to rely on public assistance is the rule, rather than the exception, even for those working 40 hours or more a week.” Fast food is a $200 billion-a-year industry.

Can the world’s biggest corporations act with impunity? When it comes to General Electric (GE) -- the eighth-largest U.S. corporation, with $146.9 billion in sales and $13.6 billion in profits in 2012 -- the answer appears to be “yes.”

Are hospitals cutting jobs because of sequestions cuts to medicare reimbursement rates? The American Hospital Association cites this as well as the recession as reasons for job cuts.

(Moderators Note. The following article is from the US Chamber of Commerce, a group that is not a friend of workers or unions.) As this blog noted nearly a year ago, the use of worker centers as front groups for unions has been a key strategy among certain labor organizations to circumvent federal laws that would otherwise restrict their behavior, so it is a good sign that Congress has started to take more notice.

Two reports on a recent Oxford University study that predicts that nearly one-half of existing jobs in the United States will be replaced by robotic machines in the next generation. Plus, a video of a related lecture by an MIT economist who specializes in the impact of technology on employment.