Portside

The official unemployment rate drastically understates the weakness of job opportunities due to the existence of a large pool of “missing workers”

The Nobel Prize has had its controversies, and its combination of science and politics can create unusual relationships.

Why can’t my biography of Shel Silverstein quote the works of Shel Silverstein? His censorious estate.

After decades of exclusion, home care workers are finally covered by federal minimum wage laws. Anyone who works for social change can learn from how they did it.

(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.

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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.

The chained CPI has risen to walk among us again in the muttering and jawboning around the government shutdown/debt limit standoff and the search for an exit. We're hearing again about a "grand bargain" on the government deficit -- never mind that the deficit is falling, not rising.